Tony frowned, and that expression at least was genuine. He didn’t like the idea that someone out there was good enough to keep an eye on his people without being seen. With me, he clearly felt fine with it. I had, after all, been captured. I understood that frown better than probably anyone else in the world could have. I have been Tony before, a man with professional skills working in less than ideal circumstances and gaining confidence in my performance over time only to find out a harsh truth or two.
“How many of you are there?” Tony asked.
“Just me,” I said. “I’m kind of the specialist for this sort of thing.”
Tony nodded distractedly, as if I had just confirmed a suspicion. Then, without warning, he stepped in and whipped the baton across the meat of my shoulder. I yelped in pain, and I’d like to say it was some clever manipulation on my part. But no, it just fucking hurt.
“What were you, special forces?” Tony asked. “Counterintelligence? No? Nothing? That’s okay. Point is, you’ve had training. You look like the kind of guy who knows how these things go. So I won’t insult you by building up slowly, and you won’t insult me by lying. I know you’re not here alone, so the next lie you tell me won’t get you a beating or even just pain. I’ll do something permanent like taking an eye or a toe. I know the little stuff won’t bother you.”
I heard the guys behind me shift, little scuffs of soles against concrete. Tony paced, slowly drifting in a wide circle around me. When he was out of sight, I let my head dip slightly, looked at the floor.
Beneath my feet were old bloodstains. Judging by the layers of discoloration, quite a lot of them and added over time. I briefly wondered how long these men had been here. We used the highway this compound was close to regularly but never had any contact with them until recently. The horrible possibilities flickered through my mind at a breakneck pace, arriving at one in particular.
They’d been here watching. They’d done it and held prisoners at some point, presumably ones with information if having a whole room dedicated to interrogating people was necessary. They were smarter than I gave them credit for, smarter even than I considered the group after one of them blindsided me outside. That small detail carried a lot of weight. It took balls, confidence, and ability to go against the common practice of simply manning the walls. Even hidden, these people were aware enough of their situation to field a runner out among the dead.
The pieces and parts began assembling themselves. Facts started to interlock.
I couldn’t play the same game. It was an instinctive realization, but one I acted on instantly. I had to change tactics.
“And you?” I said, letting my voice fall into its natural state. Gone was the practiced half-octave raise and deliberately neutral tone. “My guess is you and some of your buddies here were PMCs, right?”
Tony stopped to my three o’clock, baton still bobbing in his hand. “We prefer to be called private security.”
“Preferred, you mean,” I said. “Not like you still have a company hiring you out, right? Not much call for that at the end of the world.”
Tony came close and crouched down. Not close enough for me to reach him easily, though it could be done if I were feeling suicidal. “No, not much. Funny, though. Early on some of us did that. See, we had a big compound where we trained. Our corporate headquarters was there, on a thousand acres of fenced-off land. Stockpiles to last for years, but a bunch of us decided trading was a good idea. So we found settlements, and we traded our services for food and supplies. Worked pretty well for a while.”
“Until you figured out it would be easier to just kill people and take their stuff, right?” I asked.
Tony sighed, a remarkably passive aggressive sound. “No. We weren’t stupid. You rob too many people and they’ll fight back. Either we’d lose and die, or win and kill everyone doing all the farming. No, we took a job and got our asses handed to us. The boys that beat us senseless offered us a deal. We took it. Artemis Security stopped existing the day we joined up with the Relentless Sons.”
Again, I couldn’t help the reaction. My eyes went wide, which just made it easier to catch the gleam of Tony’s smile.
“I guess you’ve heard of us.”
10
My reaction didn’t spring from fear, but surprise. A lot of people knew who the Relentless Sons were—or rather, who they had been. I hadn’t given them any more thought since the collapse of civilization than I had my favorite football team. Until that moment, they were an unimportant relic of a dead age.
Everyone knew about the Hell’s Angels, right? When you think of biker clubs, they come to mind. Popular media give bikers a bad name. Most motorcycle clubs were made up of regular people who just had a passion for the same thing. I’d even worked alongside a few of them during my service days—many clubs with heavy veteran memberships did volunteer work. My favorites were the guys who spent their spare time acting as body guards for abused women and children. Point is, the popular myth of bikers being bad guys was a lot like the one about CIA operatives being badass killers. Overblown to a huge degree.
However, just as I proved that some CIA agents really were like Jason Bourne, the Sons showed that some biker clubs were as bad as the stereotype, or worse. In fairness to the enthusiasts, I’m pretty sure the Relentless Sons deliberately chose to adopt the lifestyle because it afforded them a lot of flexibility in building their criminal enterprises.
They didn’t have the cultural cachet of the Hell’s Angels, and that too seemed to be by design. It’s not hard to see why: being a part of—or at least appearing to be part of—a subculture can open doors and create connections. For example, if you wanted to transport illegal goods across state lines, a bunch of bikers on a ride together would be a good way to do it.
These aren’t things I put together myself. About a year before the Fall, a wave of investigative journalism about the Relentless Sons created a short but intense fad. News programs dedicated specials to them, paper journalists wrote carefully sourced articles, even a few entitled pundits with the obligatory contrarian think pieces. Public interest was strong during those few weeks. I know because at the time I was in a Los Angeles hospital healing up from a broken leg. A secondary infection kept me in the hospital, and there was nothing to do but watch TV.
I sometimes miss TV. Kinda wish I’d paid more attention to the stories about these guys.
“You know who we are,” Tony said. “You know I’m not fucking around with you. We have a reputation.” He signaled one of his buddies, who stepped forward and grabbed my hand. Tony produced a knife and flicked it open. “Again. How many of you are there?”
Let’s be absolutely clear about something: I was afraid. I know I come off as this impossibly calm dude, but that’s just years of experience creating a lot of perspective about the relative dangers of the world. A regular person freaks the fuck out when they see someone die. A nurse or a soldier, however, has seen it many times and has a different way of reacting and dealing with it. Usually this involves a lot more drinking later on and a bundle of neuroses, but the immediate reaction is what we’re talking about here.
I didn’t want to have any bits cut off, but this wasn’t my first rodeo.
“You’ve done this before,” I said, meeting Tony’s eyes. I wasn’t struggling in the least. “But you’re not trained for it. Otherwise you’d know that there’s a downside to what you’re about to do.”
Tony smiled, a smarmy little twist of the lips that immediately made me want to feed his balls to a wood chipper. “Yeah? What’s that?”
I sighed. “The subject, if untrained, will lock up when they realize you’re about to do something permanent to them. Some people will talk. The rest will decide they’ve got nothing to gain by opening their mouth, because you’re willing to disfigure them anyway. They’ll decide death is happening no matter what, and by the time you hurt them enough that they start screaming out information, chances are good it’s not accurate. At that point they’re
so confused and in so much pain they’re saying just about anything that comes to mind.”
I tilted my head at him as if I was studying a strange insect. “And that’s just how your average citizen reacts. People who’ve been trained to cope with torture are a lot less predictable.”
“People like you,” Tony suggested.
I shrugged. “Guess you’ll find out.”
“I could take my chances,” Tony said, more musing than threatening.
I nodded. “You could. But look at the scars on my face. I have ones just like them all over my body. Ask yourself if you really think chopping off stuff I might want to keep is really your best option here.”
Tony grunted and closed his knife. “You know what? You’re right. I think I have another way to convince you.”
He motioned to his pals, who hauled me to my feet. They frog-marched me through the door and down a darkened hallway. I caught a brief glimpse of light in the other direction, warm and soft, but was pushed along before I could crane my head around to take a good look. Tony, in front, opened another doorway and gestured me inside.
Not that I had much choice; the guards shoved me through. I was still stumbling forward when the door slammed shut and a lock was thrown.
A scuffling, whisking sound filled the room from every direction. I knew it immediately, and not just because it was accompanied by an awful smell. Zombies. This room was filled with zombies. I couldn’t see them—it was pitch black—but the muffled metallic tinkle of chains told me they were restrained. Probably all along the wall to prevent anyone from trying to go up. Which told me up might be a direction I wanted to go.
“Can’t believe they think this will scare me,” I muttered to myself.
“Oh, I don’t know,” a voice said from inside the room. “It’s working pretty well for me.”
I jumped. Yeah, big bad Mason. I landed awkwardly and tipped back toward a wall thanks to my stupid wrists still being zip-tied together. My balance was all fucked up. When I felt fingers scrap along the back of my shirt, however, I got myself straightened real quick.
“Jesus,” I said. “About gave me a heart attack.”
“Jesus almost gave you a heart attack?” the voice, a woman’s, said. “That doesn’t seem very Christian of him.”
“You don’t sound very scared,” I replied. “And Jesus was Jewish, assuming you believe in that kind of thing.”
I shuffled forward until I was reasonably sure I was in the middle of the room, and then carefully lowered myself to a sitting position. This required a fair amount of maneuvering thanks to my inability to freely move my damn arms, but I got there without anything really stupid happening, like falling on my ass.
“Been here a while,” the woman said. “You can only stay terrified for so long. Then you just get bored.”
I nodded, and then shook my head at my own stupidity. It was pitch black. The gestures were lost on her. “I’m Mason. How long have you been here? Where are you from?”
“Tabitha,” she said. “I go by Tabby. I was with the first group from New America they took. It’s how they found out about the others.”
“Surprised they’ve kept you alive. Once you gave them what they wanted to know...unless...” I trailed off, not wanting to finish the sentence. A few years back, survivor communities united around the idea of an amnesty for bands of marauders. Not all of them took it—not all were allowed to take it—but enough had to prevent a brewing war between them and us. Everyone knew firsthand what a certain type of man did to a captive woman. The thought sent my blood pressure on a rapid climb.
“No,” Tabby said with authority. “Whatever else these guys are, they’re not rapists. They have a lot of women with them. Not right this second, obviously. This is just their forward base, I think. But I’ve seen women come in when they change personnel.”
“There are more of them,” I said, not really asking a question. Whether Tabby knew it or not, she’d just given me a wealth of information.
She laughed, a bitter sound. “Yeah, dude. There are more of them. In the day they make me work out in the grass between the wall and this building. I’ve spent two weeks planting potatoes. They’re homesteading here, I think.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “Marauders don’t make camps. At least, they don’t do it and stay marauders. Sticking to one place and coming after people is too dangerous.”
I could almost hear the shrug in her voice when she replied. “You know who these guys are, right? Well, keep in mind that they had chapters all over the US and Canada, and it wasn’t like the world ended all at once. It took months for everything to really fall apart. I heard a couple of them talking about it, once. All the Sons got word to drop whatever shady shit they were up to and head to some gathering place up north. They’re organized, and in case you didn’t notice, they’ve recruited.”
She stopped talking for a little while, and I let the silence settle between us. It wasn’t awkward, but the way she breathed told me Tabby needed a minute.
“They brag about it, you know,” she said, her voice a little tattered. “How they took over in Canada. How they used it up.”
“Like locusts,” I guessed. “They’re moving south because they, what, ran out of people to victimize?”
“I guess.” Tabby sounded less perky the more she spoke, as if the act of conversing with another human being made it all real in some new and profound way. “I hear lots of stuff when I’m out there working. Soon as it’s too dark, they shove me back in this hole.”
“All night?” I asked. “You’re in here until morning?”
“Every damn day,” she said.
If the Sons were moving into this area, then this had to be their forward base. There was no way they’d risk these sorts of attacks if there wasn’t a shitload of backup relatively close. Testing our reactions seemed like the best explanation of why they’d act so brazenly, especially knowing the travelers being taken weren’t just random groups of people. These fuckers knew they were going after people whose disappearance would be noticed.
“What do you miss the most?” I asked a little while later during a lull in the conversation.
“Gonna have to be a little more specific,” Tabby said. “Also, that’s kind of random.”
I chuckled. “You can’t see it, but I’m shrugging. I think we’re going to be here for a while, and I’m not sleepy. I figure talking is something we can do to pass the time. So what do you miss most about the old world?”
“You first.”
“Pizza, if we’re talking about food,” I said at once. “We actually have a guy who makes it, but we don’t have the resources to spare for pepperoni just yet. And really, is it pizza without it?”
“What if we’re not talking about food?” she asked. “Not that I’m shocked that’s where your mind went first. Dudes.” She said the last with exactly the level of dismissive exasperation I expected.
I thought about it for a second. “Being able to walk around without worrying about zombies. I mean, I can handle myself. I don’t live in constant fear or anything. Back in the day the first thing I’d do in a new port was find the most crowded place possible and just wander around. Seeing the people, absorbing the culture, trying the food. Eventually I’d always find some local who knew a beautiful spot away from the bustle, and I tried to make it to them when I could. My dad and I spent a lot of time outdoors. He taught me to look for all the forgotten places, the little bits of wilderness where old trees grow and people hadn’t fucked things up just yet.”
I hadn’t meant to talk so much, but sometimes I surprised even myself.
“I’m sorry,” Tabby said.
“For what?”
“Sorry you got caught, and that you’re probably gonna die here,” she explained in a hoarse voice. “Sorry you won’t get more time to look for those places. It sounds nice.” Then, unexpectedly, she laughed. “Though I was going to say I missed the Cheesecake Factory, but yours was so good it makes me sound
like an asshole.”
“Hey, there’s a lot to be said for a good cheesecake. I went to this place in New York once—”
I was cut off by the sharp clacking of the lock being disengaged. Light, dim though it was, flooded the small space in a fuzzy rectangle that showed me Tabby’s face for the first time. She was thin but not starved, blonde hair messy but not tangled or filthy. There was fear in her eyes. I gave her a smile as reassuring as I could make it, though it wasn’t much.
“What’s going on?” she asked, looking from me to Tony, who stood framed in the doorway. “Are you taking him? Please, I don’t have anyone to talk to.”
Tony didn’t move from the doorway. “How about you tell her, smart guy? Since you seem to be so far ahead of the rest of us.”
“What’s he talking about, Mason?” Tabby asked, eyes intent on me. “Are they going to…hurt you?”
I took a deep breath to steady myself before I answered. “They’re going to try, but not directly just yet. Unless I’m way off the mark, Tony is here for you. He’s going to hurt you to get me to talk. I’m sorry.”
And then they took her, and I was alone.
11
They didn’t start all at once. I don’t know why.
Instead of waiting around like they wanted, wracked with guilt over an innocent woman being hurt on my account, I moved through the room. I studied the space as best I could in total darkness, which mostly meant listening really hard and trying not get snagged by any zombies.
The dead were eerily quiet as I, functionally a walking Happy Meal, slowly measured out my steps. It was a big room, about twenty feet on a side. I tried clapping my bound hands together to see how the sound echoed, but it didn’t work. There wasn’t enough space for me to work with. Instead I stomped with my boot, making a nice sharp crack of thunder in miniature.
Beyond The Fall (Book 1): Relentless Sons Page 7