They paused beneath a covered porch, above which hung a Pepsi sign. An American flag clung to a pole jutting out from beside the front door. The flag was ragged, faded, and worn thin, but it still hung on, and Victor wondered whether this was an appropriate symbol for the country.
“What if there’s someone here?” Jenny said.
“Then I’ll deal with them,” Victor answered as he tried to peer through the gaps in the boards covering the windows. The inside of the store was as dim as the night. Victor stepped up to the door and knocked—once, then again, and finally a third time. No sound came from inside—at least none they could hear above the storm.
“I don’t hear anything,” Jenny said.
“How can you be sure above the storm?”
“I’m sure,” she said. She had pulled the bandage above her ears, and for the first time since Victor had met her, he sensed there could be an advantage to her blindness. Maybe the lack of a primary sense would sharpen those senses people so often neglected—sound, smell, touch.
“Alright, then,” Victor said. “Let’s find out if your hearing is as good as you think.”
As they entered the darkness, Victor nearly lost his footing on a string of beads. Everything once carefully arranged on shelves and counters was now strew across the floor. Whatever things looters had found useful, they had taken. The rest - greeting cards, decorative dishes, wicker baskets - lay where they had fallen in the hunt for any scrap of food missed by previous looters. Victor wondered how many different groups had stopped here over the years. It reminded him of a documentary he had once seen about the body of a whale falling to the ocean floor, and the creatures that feasted on the body as it rotted—sharks, hagfish, bristle worms, shrimp. A whole ecosystem would develop around the organism, stripping the corpse until even the bones were gone.
In the center of the room was an old Huntsman wood stove. It was an antique even in the old-fashioned country store, but when Victor tossed some cardboard boxes inside the iron belly and lit them with his lighter, the smoke went up through the stovepipe on a strong draft. They found some blankets in another room and then sat on chairs beside the fire, letting the heat dry their clothes as Victor fed the flames with more cardboard, careful not to let the flames get too high in case the stovepipe was lined with creosote.
Victor opened his backpack and used the light of the stove to take stock of his supplies. There was a chunk of wheat bread, a few cans of vegetables, several pounds of smoked venison in plastic bags. If rationed well, the food would last him a few full days. Still, he regretted not spending a few more minutes gathering supplies before he left the cabin.
“What would you have done?” Jenny asked. Her voice was soft, with a thoughtfulness that belied her age.
“What do you mean?” he answered, still examining the food.
“You said that if someone was here, you would deal with them. What did you mean?”
“I think it’s going to be venison tonight. I should be able to find a pan somewhere in here.” He rose to his feet.
“Would you have killed them?” Jenny said.
Victor took a deep breath, wishing they did not have to continue with this topic of conversation. “If I had to, yes. Does that make me a monster?”
“People don’t have to kill each other. They choose to.”
Victor moved into the darkness of the room, searching for a pan. He had to raise his voice so she could hear him. “And what if someone wants to kill you, or someone you love? You still think you don’t have to do anything?”
“The horsemen don’t have to kill,” she answered. “They choose to. They like it.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll get no argument from me. They’re killers, alright.”
“And you would kill them if you had the chance, wouldn’t you?” Her tone did not make it sound like an accusation, but Victor knew where this was going. The problem was that, no matter how hard he tried, he could not possibly explain these things to a girl her age. She was too young to understand the world—his world, at least.
He located a pan and returned to the stove, where he began cooking the meat.
“Listen,” he said after a long silence had followed Jenny’s question, “it’s not as simple as you think. We don’t have courts to decide right from wrong any more. We just have people like you and me making choices, deciding what’s best for ourselves.” He sighed. “Those horsemen took my brother. I don’t know why they took him, but I’m going to do anything necessary to get him back. Anything.”
“You don’t believe in God, do you?” she whispered. “Because if you believed in him, you would trust him to help your brother.”
“And what if I am that help? What if I’m the only one?” He gave the pan a hard shake and stared out through the cracks in the windows at the thickening rain. “Maybe you’re right and there is a God. Maybe there is some punishment for a man who sheds blood.”
He paused, and when he spoke again his tone was bitter and sharp. “But if I must risk divine judgment to keep my little brother safe, so I can know he’s not being tortured every second he’s awake, so be it. I’ll go straight to hell if that’s what it costs.” He clenched his fists and stared down at them. “I’ll break the very world in my hands.”
He took a shuddering breath, overwrought with emotion for the first time since the kidnapping. It all closed in on him now—the weariness of the road, the way Walker had tricked him, the scream he’d heard earlier that night.
“I need him,” he whispered, a note of defeat now in his voice. “I don’t know if I ever told him that. He’s the only family I have left.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just don’t want you to be like them. Please, don’t be like them.”
Victor did not answer. His mind played a video of the horsemen riding into town, armed with guns and swords, demanding Allen surrender his own daughter. As far as she was concerned, he was now the only person in the world she could trust. She needed to know he was not going to become like the men who had robbed her of her foster father.
“Okay,” he said. “I promise, Jenny, I’m not like them. I’ll never be like them. People like them prey on the weak. They are vultures. But someone has to stop them, and that means using the same violence they practice—it’s the only way. If I don’t stop them, more people will get hurt. Just like your father.” He didn’t need to make that last comparison, but he wanted to make his meaning personal to her.
“That’s enough talk for now,” he said after a moment. “It’s time to eat.”
_____
When their meal was finished, Victor fed the fire and watched Jenny. It was strange being able to observe her without fear she would notice. He thought that, were he reduced to such a helpless state, he would just put a bullet through his brain and be done with it. He couldn’t imagine becoming a continuous burden on others.
“Jenny,” he began in a delicate voice, “Felix mentioned that your foster father - Allen - knew some things about the horsemen. Did he ever speak to you about them?”
She was silent for a few long moments. She had drawn her knees against her chests, cradling herself by the fire. Just when Victor concluded she was done talking, she took a shaky breath and said, “He didn’t like to talk about them. He said they were like a plague—they would only bring suffering.”
“But did he know something about them? Maybe about who they are?”
She was silent even longer this time. This time, however, Victor suspected she was quiet because she was thinking, not because she was hesitating.
“He told me they come from the city of Rayburn. It’s sort of their home base.”
“It’s a large city,” Victor answered. He had already considered this possibility, and though plausible, it did not make his task much easier. “There’s no telling what government rules it now, or how many smaller governments there might be. He didn’t tell you anything else?”
She hesitated.
“Jenny, if you know something that can help me—”
“They call him the Baron,” she whispered. “Papa said the horsemen are like the Ringwraiths from The Lord of the Rings. They ride around, doing the Baron’s bidding. Sometimes that means gathering food. Other times…”
“They kidnap people,” Victor finished.
She nodded. “But I don’t know why they would want your brother. They usually take children—like me.”
This confirmed what Felix had already told Victor. “Maybe the game has changed,” he murmured, scratching his chin. He could not help thinking he was engaged in some grand game of chess, and Dante was simply a pawn on the board. Victor’s opponent had made his first move. It would soon be time for Victor to answer.
He was familiar with Rayburn because he had lived near it most of his life. It was where he had found Dante before they retreated to the cabin. Was it to be the place he found Dante a second time? Victor hoped it would not come to that. The city would be a jungle by now, full of survivors better at scavenging food than growing it. It would be far better to attempt a rescue in the open country where Victor could more easily judge all the variables.
Still, the knowledge that an invisible hand might be guiding the horsemen troubled him. Dante’s kidnapping now had an orchestrated feel to it, from the way Walker surprised them (He looked at us like he knew us) to how quickly the horsemen had fled when Victor opened fire in Fairfield. The pieces might not be fitting together just yet, but Victor thought he had a clearer idea now what those pieces were.
Jenny curled into a ball by the fire and was soon asleep. Victor remained seated, keeping the fire going, letting his thoughts take their own course. Maybe he was just tired. Maybe he was over-thinking things. Or maybe…
What was that cliche used so often in movie trailers and book descriptions?
Nothing is as it seems.
_____
He woke sometime before dawn. The girl was still asleep, her chest rising and falling like flotsam on a gentle tide. She looked so small, so innocent, so helpless.
She wouldn’t have survived anyway, he told himself. With or without your help.
He returned his possessions, such as they were, to his backpack, and left a few strips of meat in the pan for the morning. Maybe it was more a cruelty than a mercy to leave her anything. Maybe the only considerate act would be to shoot her in her sleep, let her escape the nightmare her world must now become. Ironic, he thought, how much worse life could be than the most troubling of dreams.
“Goodbye,” he whispered, “and good luck.” He started to turn, then hesitated. “I’m sorry, Jenny.” That was all he could manage, weary as he was. It was not just the chase that wearied him. It was the fight within his own breast between the man he used to be and the man he wanted to become, the proverbial pair of dogs always at each other’s throats. But which of the two would prevail?
Dante’s words after Victor had forced Walker to leave came back to him: “Just kick him to the curb like he’s an old can, huh? Is that how we do things now?”
As time would prove, he had been right to distrust Walker. But was he right to leave Jenny? If he was willing to sacrifice a little blind girl after learning what he could from her, was there anyone he would not sacrifice in his quest?
Dante needs me, he told himself. I can’t let anything get in the way of that.
But then, as he turned from the girl and walked through the store, careful not to make any noise to wake her, another voice spoke in his mind.
You know better than to think you’re just doing this for Dante.
The thought chilled him, because that voice—oh, he had not heard that voice in a long time. He had worked hard to suffocate its sound. But here, in the wilderness of a lost civilization, it returned to him with its old strength, calling to him, reminding him of who he had once been.
Guess it’s true you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
It was the old Victor talking. The—
Shadow Walker.
Something overcame Victor, and for a few moments he stood still in the quiet store, listening to the silence of the pre-dawn morning and to those two voices at war, the yin and the yang, good and bad—but no, it wasn’t that simple, was it? There was no white and black. The palette held only an infinite variety of grays.
“You don’t believe in God, do you?” he heard Jenny say.
No, Victor thought, no I don’t, I never have and I never will, I can’t, not with what I know and what I have seen. If there is a God, he is a God of violence and ruin, wanton destruction, a perpetrator of chaos, an instrument of anarchy—or, as Macbeth would have it, an idiot telling a meaningless tale. And if there is such a God, then I care no more for his existence than for the creatures of the Challenger Deep that live in sunless darkness. He might as well be dead, because he will always be dead to me.
Resisting the urge to spare another glance toward the girl, he opened the door and went out into the night, because that was the man he was.
The same man he had always been.
Chapter 14: Dreamscape
Things came and things went, and most of them he forgot. All his senses seemed to have been detached from their moorings to float around him, buoyed on a euphoric tide unlike anything he had ever felt before.
Well, that was not entirely true. He had experienced highs similar to this one, but none this good. A small voice at the back of his head (Dante the scientist, he might have called it) was tapping the microphone, ready to make a speech about how he must have been given something stronger than the crack he used to mess with. It had been a while since he’d experienced any kind of high (alcohol had gone out the window with the drugs, and he’d never been a smoker), but that didn’t stop him from realizing this was different.
Better.
He was aware of the ground moving beneath him as he hovered between consciousness and helpless bliss. He was aware, too, of the presence of something important, something that was said just before this dreamscape began. Something he should remember.
Something shifted, and then a message of pain reached his brain. It was like the sound of a person knocking on the front door of the house when you’re at the back of the house. But things were starting to return to him now, to clarify a little, and he found himself opening his eyes.
A cloud was sailing across the sky. It could have been a galleon from Pirates of the Caribbean, off to find hidden treasure or blockade some port. It had better things to do than to hang around here. Dante, on the other hand, did not have better things to do. He decided to climb inside the galleon and take the helm. But where to go? Tortuga, he thought. That’s the place. Who the hell cared if he didn’t know how to get there?
“You fucked up,” someone said. Dante knew the voice…but he didn’t really know it. It was familiar the way television personalities are familiar. At first he assumed the voice was directed at him (to which he thought, Ain’t that the truth), but then a second voice answered, and this voice seemed to freeze the warm ocean that had been carrying him.
“He’s still in one piece, isn’t he?” the cold voice said.
The scientist in the back of Dante’s head was a little louder now, telling him it was important to remember that person’s name. He reached for it, but it bobbed away like driftwood.
Someone loomed over him, blocking the cloud from his view. His skin was a light brown, his beard black as jet. There was a white scar along the side of his neck where it appeared someone had cut him. This was the man, Dante remembered with a flicker of triumph, who had helped him back at the cabin. The Arab. The man seemed to carry himself like a wrestler in the ring, two hundred or more pounds of muscle and bone ready to pounce on an enemy.
Perhaps it was the drug talking, but Dante had a sudden intuition this was a man who sought to keep things in balance, doing good as a counterweight to the necessary evil.
Very perceptive, the scientist remarked. Our patient must be waking up.
“Let’s see if he tries running now,” the cold voice said. Walker—yes, that was his name, like the zombies in the Walking Dead series. Dante thought that voice could easily have belonged to a serial killer. Maybe it did.
“You don’t know a damn thing,” the Arab answered. “If you hadn’t jumped the gun, we would all be halfway home by now.”
“Right,” Walker said in a low voice. “A big old family reunion.”
“Hey guys,” a third voice said. His voice was shallow and thin. Dante turned his head to the side and saw the speaker, a young man with a black beanie and a wisp of a mustache. His cheeks were pockmarked by acne. If he was twenty, Dante was the President of the United States.
As Dante watched, the young man turned his hand open, revealing stained fingers.
“Damn it all,” the Arab murmured. “We’ll have to stop. At least it will give him time to clear his head.” He nodded in Dante’s direction as he said this. Dante, with faculties growing sharper by the moment, found it interesting the Arab did not say his name, even though he must have learned it by now. Did he feel a pang of guilt? Perhaps. Or perhaps he was the kind of person who didn’t name an animal if he knew it would soon be slaughtered.
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