Her breathing was shallow as she made her way to the front gate. She was nervous of course; it was a fool’s errand to underestimate any new threat. She took everyone seriously from the outset. It was safer that way. But she was not panicked, at least not yet. A lot of nerve, these newcomers must’ve had. Their murder of Ray was monstrous, but did they really think they could just march in here and scare them?
If they expected Promise to simply roll over, well, they had another thing coming. Promise was strong, well-armed. Their only disadvantage had been not finding their harassers first. It was never a good idea to show weakness in this world. You couldn’t let people think that you had no spine, no backbone. Unless you showed that you were willing to defend what you had with force if necessary, then any old Tom, Dick or Harry could just come in and take what was rightfully yours.
Three men were waiting for them just inside the signs marking the entrance to Promise. Jack and Jon Schlosser were already there. Both were holding rifles, but the muzzles were pointed at the ground. The three men were unarmed, which Lucy found very curious. The leader was a tall, white man of average build. A thick, bushy, salt-and-pepper mustache danced above his upper lip. His face was leathery and wrinkled. It was like the scene back on the road, but also nothing like it all. They were here on their doorstep.
As Lucy approached, he raised his arm in friendly acknowledgment. Lucy did not return the gesture. She didn’t trust gestures of goodwill from strangers.
She came abreast Jack and the other Council members.
“How you folks doing?” the man asked.
“Can we help you with something?” Lucy asked.
The man looked at each of his compatriots in turn. Then he looked back at Lucy, a big smile breaking across his face.
“Just trying to be neighborly,” he replied.
“How about we just skip to the end, and you tell us what you want?” Jack said.
The man nodded slowly in mock approval of Jack’s demand.
“I like you,” he said, wagging a gnarled finger at her. “You don’t mess around. Down to business as they say.”
“Give me one reason I shouldn’t blow your head off,” Jack said.
“Oh, aren’t you Mr. Tough Guy?”
Jack raised his shotgun, and Lucy thought he was going to shoot the man. Lucy wouldn’t have minded such a fate for this jackass, but she was getting the feeling that this was not in their long-term interest.
“All these guns,” he replied.
He waved away Jack’s weapon dismissively as though it were a water balloon. He did not seem the least bit intimidated by Jack’s threat to execute him. Lucy began to feel very uneasy.
“You can do what you want to me,” he said. “But please keep in mind that if any harm befalls me or my friends, every single one of you will be dead by tomorrow.”
Silence.
“Anyway, my name is Joshua. We are representatives of the Haven, a community like this one not too far from here. We are looking to expand our footprint. Bring in some smaller communities. There is safety in numbers, after all.”
The Haven. Well, now they had a name to go with the face. A stupid clichéd name from post-apocalyptic books and movies, but a name, nevertheless.
“Not interested,” Lucy said.
He chuckled.
“Oh, I am sorry if there was any confusion,” Joshua said. “We’re not really asking.”
“You’ve really got some nerve,” Jack said. “You are barking up the wrong tree, friend.”
“Look, we hate unnecessary violence,” Joshua said. “But we need you to understand how very serious we are. We know that you’re a formidable group, and that you have a lot to offer. But we don’t want you getting any ideas. If you try to resist, the penalties will be, shall we say, severe.”
“Did you not hear me, dickweed?” Jack asked angrily. “The answer is no.”
Joshua’s mouth scrunched up in disappointment, making a tsking sound as he did so. Then he held up a single finger. A shot rang out; before Lucy could process what had happened, Kyle slumped to the ground. A large caliber bullet had blown his head apart. The poor man was dead before he hit the ground.
“We have you surrounded by a dozen snipers,” he said. “We will just keep killing you until you agree to our terms.”
Jack raised his weapon again, and this time he really was going to fire. Lucy stepped in and placed a hand on the barrel.
“Jack, don’t.”
Lucy was boiling with rage, and she wanted nothing more than to kill these three men where they stood. But for now, they had the upper hand. Better to live to fight another day. The day she had long feared was at hand. Outnumbered, outgunned, outsmarted. Putting up any additional resistance today would simply cost them more lives. There were times when you put up, and there were times when you shut up. Unfortunately, now was the time for the latter.
“What do you want?” she asked
“Simple, my dear,” he said. “We want you to contribute.”
“To what?”
“To the good of the order,” he said.
“What does that mean?” she said.
“We want half,” he said.
“You must be out of your goddamned mind,” Jack said.
“Jack, no!”
Joshua held up a finger again, and another shot rang out. From somewhere deeper in the compound, a scream. Another life snuffed out.
“Do I have your complete attention now?”
Lucy gripped Jack’s elbow and squeezed it in an attempt to keep him quiet.
“Yes.”
“We want half of everything you produce each week,” Joshua said. “We’ve been watching you, and we have a pretty good sense of what you’ve got here. We’ll send couriers every Friday at noon to collect. We’ll do an inventory now so we can get a sense of what we’ll be expecting every week. And God help you if you miss your quota.”
Lucy didn’t bother informing him that such a tax on their resources would leave them precious little to stretch across two hundred mouths. The cruelty, after all, was the point. To keep them working, producing more so that they could meet their quota and feed their community. A dominated group would be less likely to cause a ruckus.
The crowd behind them began murmuring to one another, stunned by the ultimatum and terrible violence that had been unleashed on their community.
Joshua held up a finger once more, a single, terrible finger.
One final shot rang out.
A thud behind her.
The crowd scattered.
11
It was their first day of tribute. Everyone was up early to ensure everything was ready. The previous week had been spent in the fields, harvesting the kale, chard, lettuce, rutabagas, radishes, and carrots that were coming up. These vegetables, along with eggs and cheese, constituted a large portion of Promise’s early spring diet. Lucy was happy to have food regardless of the form it came in, but if she were being honest, the early spring vegetables had been her least favorite. Now, though, they seemed so precious.
All day, wheelbarrows were running back and forth from the field to the barn, wrapping the produce in thin cheesecloth to keep it dry. They would easily meet the first quota. Better to focus on the positives. Thinking about a time they might not meet it was a one-way ticket to despair. The community was terrified. Joshua’s snipers had killed three people that day without so much as blinking. Sophie, Kyle, and Peter joined Ray as the latest victims of their occupiers.
The visitors were expected at midday when the sun was at its peak. Without clocks and watches and smartphones to measure the time of day, though, that was more of a guidepost rather than a specific appointment time. It was still strange, not being able to look at a clock or smartphone to check the time. Lucy had been obsessed with keeping the time. Upon her return to the farm five years earlier, she had taught herself how to read a sundial with a reference book from the library. It was a link to the old world.
They fin
ished the work late in the morning, around two hours before the arrival of the couriers. Lucy checked in on her two inpatients at the clinic and did some paperwork. One with a broken leg and one complaining of chest pains. As she was finishing up, Jack arrived with two stainless steel mugs of coffee.
They sat on camping chairs just outside the clinic, waiting for their date with destiny. She didn’t know where this path would lead. She just hoped they could adjust to this new reality. It reminded her vaguely of the lockdowns in the early weeks and months of the coronavirus pandemic. Just like that, boom. Sports, schools, restaurants had shut down. It was a stark reminder that your entire world could change without warning.
“Should be an easy week,” she said.
“Hooray for us,” he said, holding up his mug in a sarcastic toast. Normally sullen and morose on a good day, Jack had become even more so in the days following the takeover of Promise.
“Look, I don’t like this either,” she said. “But we have to be patient.”
“This is bullshit.”
He was ornery this morning, so she didn’t reply. Nothing good would come of it, at least not right now. His left eyebrow twitched once and then a second time. It was the canary in the coal mine of Jack Goodwin’s legendary temper, his reactor core melting down.
When Lucy had been in the eleventh grade, she had briefly dated a boy named Jeff Powell. Like Jack, Jeff was a senior, a fine lacrosse player on his way to the University of Maryland on an athletic scholarship. He was handsome and charming and intelligent, and that was why it had been so surprising when he had hit Lucy the first time. They had been fooling around, and he had wanted her to go down on him, which she did not want to do.
She was only sixteen years old and was inexperienced with boys generally. She was aware that sometimes men hit women, and sometimes it happened to girls her age, even with boys they had known since they were little. But she never imagined it would happen to her.
After gently denying his request, she had laid her head on his chest because she did not understand that things had changed, irrevocably so. But then he had smacked her on the top of the head. Nothing too hard, just an expression of his displeasure. When she reared up, though, he had delivered a runaway fist to her eye, splitting the skin over her eyebrow.
She got up and rushed out of his house, skittering down the stairs like a startled deer escaping a hunter. She zipped past his father, a federal district court judge, reading in his easy chair, out onto their expansive front porch with the columns and fancy Adirondack chairs. She ran home, blood trickling down her cheek. She tried sneaking into the house through the back door, hoping to avoid running into her parents or brother. But she stumbled across Jack on the porch steps, sneaking an illicit cigarette. When he saw her standing in the spill of the backyard floodlight, he reared back in surprise.
“What happened to your face?” he asked.
The adrenaline of her flight from Jeff’s bedroom had faded from her, and now a dull, heavy throb had settled around her eye.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re fucking bleeding, Luce.”
He got up and gently tilted her cheek toward the light.
“I tripped while I was walking home.”
He scoffed.
“Bullshit,” he snapped. “Tim do this to you?”
“Jack, please.”
It was the wrong thing to say because it confirmed Jack’s suspicions. She had intended to keep lying to Jack. But somewhere, deep inside, she didn’t want to keep lying. Deep down, she understood Jeff Powell did not deserve her protection.
“That asshole.”
He was on his feet now, the cigarette pitched to the ground and crushed under his black Doc Martens. There had been rumors that Jeff Powell was rough on girls, but Jack had never verified them. It was always a friend of a friend who’d heard from someone that had seen him smack a girl he was dating.
As he stood there, quivering with rage, his eyebrow had started twitching, rippling like a coked-up caterpillar. The fuse had been lit. He bolted from the yard, leaving Lucy alone. She chased after him, telling herself that she wanted to stop him from doing anything rash, but understanding years later that she had simply wanted to see what he would do.
According to the police report filed early the next morning, Jack had kicked down the Powells’ door and beaten Hunter into unconsciousness, leaving him with two broken ribs, a detached retina, and a lacerated kidney. Hunter, who was no slouch physically, had made the mistake of believing he was any kind of match for Lucy’s angry brother. He was not. He spent three weeks in the hospital after which he was advised to never play lacrosse again.
Jack was charged with malicious wounding and aggravated assault. He spent six months in a juvenile detention facility, extremely fortunate that he had been eight months shy of his eighteenth birthday at the time of the attack. He then enrolled in a military school for the balance of his high school career before enlisting in the Army.
His eyebrow was twitching now.
They were silent but for her brother’s heavy, ragged breathing. The respiration of an angry, cornered animal. She agreed that the current status quo couldn’t last, but they were not ready to mount a counteroffensive yet. They just did not have enough intelligence on their opponent. They had been so busy working to meet the quota that there had been little time to focus on forming a resistance. Sure, they had talked about it with gusto, from killing the next group of couriers to poisoning their share. But so far, it had been just talk. If they misplayed their hand, the Haven could slaughter all of them.
“We need to figure out where they’re from,” Lucy said. “It can’t be too far.”
The Haven’s base of operations remained a carefully hidden secret. Their territory was large. According to reports from other communities, the couriers’ wagons were loaded down with booty from multiple locations, including items from outside their trading circle. They may have come from as far west as Charlottesville or from Fredericksburg to the north. They may have had interests in the city of Richmond, a dozen miles to the east.
“That’ll take too long,” her brother replied. “We need to act now. I say we kill anyone who shows up today.”
“No,” she said. “If we make a move now, it could blow up in our face.”
He got up and stormed off. She lingered a minute in her chair, trying to find the words that would settle him down. They couldn’t afford a misstep at this point. It was too soon. She joined Jack outside; he was looking up at the sky. He often looked to the heavens for comfort, as she did. A reminder that they were just a bit of the big picture, a few grains of self-aware dust in the great big nowhere.
“Promise me,” she said. “You won’t do anything rash. We’ll come up with a plan.”
“I promise,” he said.
She wanted to believe him.
She wasn’t sure she did.
They arrived right on schedule.
Four on horseback, one of the animals pulling the bed of a pickup truck that had been retrofitted into a bizarre horse-drawn carriage. All men, all fearsome looking. Many of Promise’s residents were on hand, curious as to how this day would play out. They all stood in a light drizzle while the men dismounted. One approached Lucy, brushing dirt and grime from his hands. He wore jeans and a denim jacket. Thick stubble covered his face. He reeked of body odor.
“Let’s make this quick,” he said. “We got everything?”
He lacked any of Joshua’s charm or wit. He looked healthy and well-fed. More evidence that their enemy was powerful and not to be underestimated.
“Yep.”
The team responsible for collecting the loot had stored the haul on large tarps, which made it easy to slide the week’s share to the entrance. It looked like a splendid farmer’s market, hundreds of pounds of leafy green and root vegetables making up the season’s first bounty.
She did her best to ignore Jack, who stood seething next to her. She could almost feel the rage radi
ating from his body. The sound of the ligaments and tendons popping in his hands as he tightened and unfurled his fists were audible in the silent afternoon air.
“We’ve got a large produce scale in the pickup,” the man said. “Start loading.”
The collection team stepped forward. The four of them had worked hard to itemize the harvest. It was important to know what was coming in from the fields, and more importantly, what was headed out the door.
Esther, one of the farmhands, began filling the weighing bowl with as much produce as it could hold. One of the men wrote down the weight of each load onto a clipboard. Then Esther loaded the goods into large plastic bags the Haven had brought with them. It was a lengthy, tedious process and took the better part of an hour. Lucy’s heart ached as their conqueror’s wagon grew heavier with the fruits of their labor.
“Everything looks good,” he said as they finished tallying up the day’s take. “The boss will be happy.”
“Your boss can go fuck himself,” Jack said quietly but firmly.
The man looked up from his clipboard with a bemused look on his face.
“What the hell did you just say?”
“You heard me.”
Jack had a strange, little smirk on his face.
The man grabbed Jack by his shirt collar and pulled him close. Jack did not react. He simply continued smirking at the man. For a moment, she worried the man might kill Jack, but as the scene played out, it was clear that he would not. Jack had pushed his luck right to its razor’s edge but no farther.
The man did rear back and slam a fist directly into Jack’s ribcage. Jack doubled over, wheezing, coughing, gagging. While he was bent over, the man brought up a knee into Jack’s chin, which sent him staggering back to the seat of his pants. The man was much bigger than Jack, and the blows had done some damage. Jack lay writhing quietly, but Lucy knew her brother would have no regrets. He’d taken this opportunity to vent his frustrations in a way that hadn’t gotten him killed.
While Lucy checked on Jack, the other residents finished loading the last bit into the trailer. Without another word, the men climbed back into their saddles while the wagon driver made a wide U-turn before pulling away from Promise. Everyone retreated gingerly to the cottages and lodges while Lucy watched them pull away, kicking up a fine cloud of dust as they did so.
American Midnight | Book 2 | Nightfall Page 9