by Jim Heskett
While cruising into town, he found Kellen and White with almost no trouble. They’d stayed on the same road and had stopped to have a chat with someone sitting on the roof of a car in the middle of the street. Some dying person. Some Red Street.
What were they hoping to accomplish? If they wanted to rob him, why not simply take his stuff? The guy clearly couldn’t defend himself. What possible purpose could they gain by having a chat with him?
Sometimes, regular people made no sense at all.
With a sigh, Lincoln lowered the binoculars. Then, it hit him. They were learning about the Eighteener army. This Red Street had survived the assault on Topeka and was now explaining to Kellen and White what had happened.
Maybe they were trying to form their own army. Maybe they were planning to unite the Red Streets across the country to face off against Alma and her people.
The thought was so juicy, Lincoln almost wanted to see it happen. Some giant gang war, like a row of bears on one side and a row of lions on the other. They meet in the middle, claws flying, blood spattering. Tear each other to pieces, leaving only scraps of flesh and bone in the rivers of blood.
“And teeth,” he said.
Chapter 14
Kellen - Topeka
The Red Streets member launched into a coughing fit, so Kellen and White helped him down from the hood of the car and carried him into a nearby building. Looked like it had been a convenience store at one time, but the shelves were bare now. Anyway, better to be inside, out of the cold.
The man looked way too old to be a gang banger. At least fifty, with sprouts of gray hair jutting out from underneath his black bandanna. His leather jacket curved over his sizable belly, and the wrinkles on his tanned face turned it into something like leather. Kellen supposed that age didn’t matter. Most people, regardless of other factors, needed community. Join up or die.
Kellen gave the man water to drink, and he lifted the mouth of the bottle to blistered lips. The man thanked Kellen with his eyes, greedily slurping the water.
“What more is there to tell about it?” Kellen said, as soon as the man had stopped drinking.
“Evil,” he said, switching his one good eye back and forth between them.
White frowned. “Evil?”
“An evil I thought was long dead. Something that only lived in my nightmares.”
Kellen pursed his lips and said nothing. This guy sounded like the hype man outside of a Halloween haunted house, but Kellen wanted him to spill what he knew.
After another coughing fit, the man spoke again. “Maybe you two aren’t aware, but all of this was started by a group named the Five Suns.”
Kellen hid a grim smile and waited for the man to continue.
“The Five Suns,” the man said, “was a political organization. Grassroots at first, all about reasonable regulations and small business and sustainable blah blah blah. That was before it got corrupted by all the damn special interest groups.”
Kellen winced. He hadn’t heard many of those words and phrases in nearly two decades. He said nothing, trying to be patient with the man’s story.
“They’re the ones who faked the meteor hoax,” the Red Street said. “Edward LaVey, Peter Anders, Hector Castillo, Beth Fortner, and George Grant.”
Hearing George’s name made Kellen involuntarily swallow the lump in his throat. An image of George flashed, standing in the entryway of that athletic dorm in Alabama, holding a man’s suit in his hands. Stunned that Kellen had somehow found a way out of the room they’d been keeping him in as a cell. Kellen slashing the baseball bat down on his head. White, at that time, one of George’s quasi-unwilling henchmen, witnessing the attack.
“How do you know all those names?” Kellen said. “Castillo and Fortner weren’t public figures. They weren’t in the spotlight.”
The Red Street grunted. “I used to work in Washington, genius. I was a journalist before all the shit went down.”
Kellen’s head buzzed. If that were true, this man and Kellen might have shared the same line at Starbucks, might have both struggled to find room to sit at Ben’s Chili Bowl on a busy night. So many memories of his old life sprinted through Kellen’s brain.
“We know about the Five Suns,” White said. “What does that have to do with us now? They’re all long dead.”
The gang member cocked his head. “You sure about that?”
“Yes,” Kellen said. “Anders, LaVey, and Castillo all died in Denver a few years ago. Beth Fortner was executed in Boston, and George Grant died in Alabama.”
The man shook his head and laughed, which brought on another round of coughing. “You’re wrong. So wrong.”
White was starting to show his anger. “You better start making sense. I know for a fact George Grant is dead because I saw him die right in front of me. I was standing over him with a god damn bloody baseball bat.”
“Sure you were,” the guy said, blaring a doubting smile.
Kellen gritted his teeth. “Believe us or don’t, but we know what we saw.”
“Then why did he and his army stroll through here a couple days ago? Destroying anything left in this town?”
Panic gripped Kellen. “What are you talking about?”
“It was him,” the man said. “He’s got a big bushy beard now, put on some weight, compared to how he used to look on TV when he did those press conferences. Doesn’t matter; I know it was him. I met him once in the rose garden. Plus, he was marching through with Hector and Hector’s kid. She’d been here before, causing trouble with her little army. Guess Alma’s got a big one now.”
Kellen and White shared a look. That explained why the name had been haunting Kellen; why it had felt so close to memory.
Alma.
He hadn’t interacted with Hector Castillo much in the old days, but Kellen knew he’d had a daughter. And now he remembered the name. Alma Castillo. Paranoid Hector had kept her hidden away, in Texas or Oklahoma or some place like that.
But the rest of what this gang banger was saying? Couldn’t be right. Hector Castillo was alive?
Another flash of the past bubbled up to the surface. Three years ago, the day after the old man Coyle had visited him at Union Station in Denver, going across the street to retrieve Hector’s body, and finding it gone. Kellen had assumed some other scavenger had taken it.
What if Coyle had been mistaken, and he hadn’t killed Hector that day? Only wounded him, and Hector had sneaked away to find a place to convalesce?
And George? What if he’d faked that heart attack and Kellen had been too rattled at the time to appreciate the difference? It’s not as if they’d buried George Grant. As soon as White had said George had no pulse, they’d left him there to get the hell away from that building.
He could have easily bluffed his way through a heart attack. And now, George, Hector, and Alma were on the move, headed west.
With an army of thousands.
Chapter 15
Kellen - Kansas City
From Topeka to Kansas City, Kellen’s head was like a swarm of bees. White was silent, driving across the flatlands of wheat and old grain silos, which was fine with Kellen. Barbed wire fences. Long stretches of straight highways and wide, cloudless skies.
Kellen didn’t want to talk. Didn’t want to lash out at White for not ensuring George Grant had been dead in the athletic dorm, those years ago. Kellen hadn’t made sure either, but it would have been easier to blame it on White than admit his own mistake.
Also, he didn’t want to dredge up all the other ghosts from the past that had surfaced as a result of the conversation with the old, dying gang member. Thoughts of his life in Washington, being an errand boy for Senator Edward LaVey. Being figuratively stabbed in the back by Beth Fortner and then literally kidnapped by George Grant. The misery and bleakness that had followed.
Finally, he didn’t want to accept that, three years ago, he’d had a chance to promptly cross the street in Denver to make sure Hector Castillo was dead as well,
but he’d waited until the following day. Maybe he would have found an injured Hector and Kellen could have finished him. Maybe.
None of that mattered now.
Now they were alive, along with some young blood, in the form of Hector’s daughter. They possessed an army and were creeping west to lobby for more support. To balloon their already impressive numbers. With ten thousand men, they could topple any fledgling governments between here and Washington and probably crush Rappaport’s forces in the process. Kellen didn’t know how big Rappaport’s army was, but ten thousand sounded like a stretch.
Since they were both distracted, neither of them noticed the blockade on I-70 up ahead until it was too late to turn around. On a bridge, across both lanes of the highway, cars had been piled up, forming a cluster. It looked like a twenty-car pile up, reaching from side to side and blocking access into the city.
As soon as Kellen noticed it, he grabbed White by the arm. “Ahead! There! Slow down!”
White hit the brakes only a hundred feet from the wall of cars, and when Kellen spun to check behind them, four operational cars had already pulled in to block off the road. Blockade ahead, cars behind, thirty-foot drop-off to a river below.
“Shit,” Kellen said. “We should have known this would happen. You might as well pull forward to see what they want.”
“Sorry,” White said, teeth gritted. “I’m doing the best I can.”
Kellen realized his tone might have been too harsh. “I know you are. I’m sorry I snapped at you, but this took me by surprise. It’s been that kind of day.”
From the heap of cars emerged a half dozen men and women. Burned flesh on their necks and hands, poking out from their coats and scarves. Infinity.
“This is bad,” White said as he parked.
Kellen sighed and patted the big bald man on the back of the hand. “Let’s get it over with.”
He and White left the car. They took steps toward the Infinity, who seemed content to stand their ground and wait. None of them appeared armed except for one man brandishing a machete, but it would be easy to conceal weapons in all that clothing. The man with the machete was Asian, which was unusual for Infinity. They seemed to be comprised of mostly white people, or at least they had been. Maybe it was a sign of their dwindling numbers, that they now allowed people they used to consider undesirables.
“Didn’t know there were any of your kind left,” Kellen said. He didn’t care that his tone would antagonize them. After this day, he almost wanted a fight.
You want an excuse to give up, whispered the judge in Kellen’s head.
One of the burned men, this one with gnarled flesh on top of his bald head and fiery green eyes, laughed with the wooden passion of a man trying to sound frightening but failing. “We are Infinity. We’re everywhere.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” Kellen said. “We don’t have much to pay in the way of tolls. Been a long time getting this far.”
The Infinity all turned their heads, looking back at the pile of cars. “Toll?” the green-eyed man said. “There is no toll here. There is no passage here.”
“So do we back up, or what?” White said. There were four more Infinity cultists at the cars blocking the way behind them. Their cars lined end to end across the bridge.
Kellen knew what the man had meant, and his hand drifted closer to the pistol in the back of his waistband. He did some quick math of the number of them versus the number of bullets he guessed he had left in his current magazine. The spare mag was in the car, behind him. Unless he was underestimating, he didn’t have enough bullets to shoot all of them. And he didn’t know if White had brought his gun.
“No,” said the Infinity spokesman, rocking back and forth on his feet, looking pleased with himself. “There is no passage here, or anywhere. This city is unclean. Since you are here that makes you unclean as well. Sorry, boys, but this is where your journey comes to an end.”
The woman standing a few feet to the left removed a hand grenade from her belt, and Kellen didn’t wait to deliberate further about how many bullets he had remaining. He drew the pistol and shot her in the chest.
Her hand spasmed forward, tossing the grenade right at them.
Had she pulled the pin? Kellen couldn’t see.
“Go!” White shouted, as he drew a gun and raced forward. With both of them blasting, they cut down all six of the Infinity ahead in three seconds. Kellen’s head pulsed from the noise of the weapons. He would never get used to gunfights, no matter how many he had seen.
Behind them, their car exploded. It leaped a foot into the air and then settled. The force of the blast knocked them both forward. Kellen tasted the asphalt as his forehead connected, and he rolled several times along the bridge. Head thunked on something hard. His eyes shut for a moment.
Before he knew what was happening, White was above him, pulling the trigger. Kellen opened his eyes to see bullets tear apart the four Infinity members at the rear blockade.
And Kellen’s car, plus all their supplies, burning to a crisp.
Chapter 16
Alma - Pueblo
Alma and Jarvis stood at the edge of downtown Pueblo, a few hours south of Denver. The city was mostly whole, a surprising feat. Her father had said little during their trip through southern Colorado, but she could see the pride on his face. Only two hours north of here, he had set off the bombs at the Air Force Academy, the first attack on the old world. Alma had been only a teenager then, not sure if she wanted to join her father’s rebellion against the world. She’d known she was destined for great things, but the exact nature didn’t come into focus until much later.
The night of the bombing, she did, however, understand the importance of it. The first grand gesture to flush the world of all the corruption and backward politics.
And flushing the system might have worked, had it not been for that bitch, Beth Fortner. Her betrayal and theft of the missile silo codes.
But it wasn’t too late to save this country. Alma could correct the mistakes and make it right. Force this country into a working machine again.
“This town is a piece of shit,” Jarvis said, sneering.
Alma regarded him with a blank face because anything else earned a pouty response from Jarvis. She knew the male species well enough to know he wanted to feel respected and admired. Wanted to feel like he had a chance to sleep with her, even though she would never even dream of it. A batted eye, a flip of the hair, lightly touch his arm; it always worked. As much as she detested this pig Jarvis, she would flirt if it would help buy favor with his five thousand troops.
“How so?” Alma said. “The architecture is nice. There were no bombs here. Most of it is still standing.”
Jarvis spat on the sidewalk and had a seat on an overturned newspaper dispenser. “Red Streets. They’re roaches, hiding from the light. I can still feel them, like a film left over in the shower.”
Their combined armies had removed the Red Streets from this town over the course of the night, and as the sun was rising in the east, everything seemed quiet. It hadn’t even been much of a fight. Still, Jarvis’ prejudices seemed to cloud his judgment. Another reason he was unfit to lead.
“Not for much longer,” she said, and he thumped his heels against the newspaper dispenser as a response.
“Great big piles of horseshit,” he said.
An interesting choice of words. “Where are you from?”
“What do you care?”
She forced a smile and sat on the concrete next to him, looking up at him so he would feel tall. With a shrug, she said, “just making conversation. It would help if we could find some common ground.”
“You want to wipe out these vermin Red Streets, and so do I. That’s our common ground.”
She nodded, even though she didn’t concur with his assessment. She cared little for the Red Streets, actually, or even the Eighteeners. They were obstructions and tools, nothing more. Her sights were set on Helen Rappaport’s army out east and do
ing what needed to be done to remove them from the equation.
“Yeah,” she said, “we’ll be better off if we can get rid of them.”
After a pause, Jarvis shoved a hand into his pocket and removed a small rusted tin. From inside it, he drew a toothpick and shoved it in his mouth. He switched it back and forth a few times, then said, “Corpus Cristi.”
“What’s it like there?”
He sucked on the toothpick and stared up at the side of a building. Looked like a courthouse, perhaps. “It’s humid. Or it was. Probably still is, but I wouldn’t know. I got the fuck out of there when I was eighteen.”
“I grew up in Oklahoma,” she said. “Humid there too, which never made sense because it’s a landlocked state.”
For a second, she thought he might crack a smile and continue the small talk, but nothing of the sort happened. He dropped the toothpick on the ground, hacked, and spat a wad of green spit.
“Oklahoma sucks balls,” he said as he stood. “I always hated that redneck state.”
Alma tried to breathe through it. How hard did she have to try with this guy?
Fortunately, she didn’t have to find out by enduring this conversation any longer. From around a building, two of Jarvis’ men dragged a captured Red Streets member. The man’s long hair swished as his head lolled from side to side while they hefted him along. He was bleeding from several cuts on his face and neck. His eyes were drooping, almost dead.
“What’s this?” Alma said.
One of the soldiers cleared his throat. “He has information, ma’am.”
She snapped her fingers, and the man raised his head a few inches to meet her eye.
“Out with it,” she said.
“You’re walking into a trap.”