“I’m sorry,” he whispered to Jenny. “But I’ll get you out of this. I promise I won’t leave you here.”
“Okay,” she whispered back, but he could hear the doubt in her voice. Worst of all, he felt the same uncertainty.
_____
The interior of the police department was lit by candles, lending an almost sacrificial quality to Victor’s walk. Even the Federation, it seemed, had not figured out a reliable way to generate electricity.
Blackburn brought him to a small room with plastic chairs and a long mirror. That was about all Victor could make out in the darkness. He was more familiar with this kind of room than he liked, and he had to fight back the memories that pushed their way to the surface.
Blackburn took his backpack and weapons, and then told him to take a seat. The chair was almost too smooth. Victor wondered how many asses had polished it over the years.
“Know any good lawyers?” he asked.
Blackburn snorted. “Just sit tight. Someone will be here shortly.”
“Right. I’m sure I’m your highest priority. When you pick someone up, how do you divide their things? Dice? First come, first serve? Eeny, meeny, miny, moe?”
Blackburn was looking at him like he didn’t understand.
“Don’t play dumb,” Victor said. “I know how this goes. If you’re going to fuck me over, at least look me in the eye.”
“Listen, wise guy, you may think we’re just a bunch of thugs playing politics, but I was here from the start.” He tapped his finger on the table. “I was National Guard, called in to stop the riots.”
“Well, you did one hell of a job. I’d give you a medal if you had a chest I could pin it on.”
Blackburn shook his head in disgust. “You know what? Fuck you, man! I don’t need to listen to this.” He stepped into the hallway, then turned back—with a few more choice words, no doubt.
“You think you’re a hero because that girl thinks you are?” Blackburn asked. “Well if you were half a man, you’d have put a bullet in her head when you found her, because it’s only going to get worse for her.”
“You finished?”
“Yeah, I’m finished. I’ll leave you to sit on your hands. If you get bored, feel free to count the tiles on the floor or something.”
Victor gave him a mocking salute. “Roger that, Captain Blackburn.” He almost let Blackburn walk away, almost, but he had one more quip to get in before their conversation was finished.
“You wanna know the downside to being the muscle?”
“What’s that?”
“They don’t have shit for brains.”
Blackburn’s face contorted with anger, but before he could march back into the room (to spit his reply in Victor’s face, more than likely), the glow of a light filled the hallway.
“I’ll take it from here,” said a woman carrying a kerosene lamp. She started to push past Blackburn, but he placed a hand on her arm.
“I’d be careful with this one,” he said, glaring at Victor. “I know his kind. He’ll tell you he’s a team player, but he’s only looking out for himself.”
With her free arm, the woman reached down and separated herself from Blackburn’s grasp. “That’s why you stay at the door,” she said. “But close it, please, so we can have at least a semblance of privacy?”
Blackburn grudgingly complied. Once the door was closed, the woman set the lamp on the table and sat down.
“So, what was his excuse?” she asked.
Victor raised an eyebrow.
“For bringing you in here,” she added. “What excuse did he give you?”
“Said I needed to be deloused.”
She suppressed a smile. “Do you need to be deloused?”
“Are you offering?”
Now she permitted that smile to grow. She was wearing a red blouse, a black pencil skirt, and a pair of high heels that looked entirely out of place in their surroundings. But it was the out-of-place of a beautiful woman in a seedy bar who didn’t need a mask of make-up to draw attention.
Be careful, Victor warned himself, trying to recall how long it had been since he was even in the same room as an attractive woman. He couldn’t remember the last time.
“Tempting as your offer is,” she said, “I prefer to keep my distance from men who smell like they haven’t bathed in weeks.”
“Oh, that’s just your friend you’re smelling.”
The woman glanced at the door. “A real charmer, isn’t he?” she murmured, not raising her voice enough for Blackburn to hear her. She leaned forward and interlaced her fingers on the table. “Well, I’m sure you know we didn’t bring you in here to banter.”
“Actually, I don’t have a damn clue why I’m here.”
She studied him closely in the glow of the lamp. The light cast some of her features in shadow, others in stark relief, like one of Rembrandt’s early self-portraits. There was a frankness to her appraisal that Victor found engaging. He could imagine what she must be seeing—a dirty, unkempt, dangerous outsider, whose smell in that confined space was like piss in a bottle. But she treated him like he was the cover of a novel that had caught her eye. Then again, maybe she treated everyone this way.
“What’s your name?” she said.
He answered, and then she told him her name was Cora.
“Let me see your hand,” she continued.
Victor smiled a little. “Are you going to tell me my fortune?”
She waited, unsmiling, until he had reached his arm across the table. She took his hand and turned it over so that the palm faced the ceiling.
He said, “Sure you don’t want to tell me my fortune? Cause I’d sure love to know where this road leads.”
“You don’t have the mark,” she answered. She lay her own arm on the table beside his. There was a stamp on her wrist in the shape of P, with enough designs around it to make the mark difficult to replicate.
“It’s all we have for now,” she said as she withdrew her arm. Her fingers brushed against his, sending a chill all the way to his spine.
“So you need the mark to get into the clubhouse,” Victor said.
“More or less. It’s how we distinguish our own from outsiders. You don’t know how many people try to slip into our community, posing as one of our own.” The way she paused suggested to Victor she was giving him a chance to explain himself, if he wanted to.
“Hey,” Victor said, “I didn’t ask to be brought here.”
“You wish you’d been left? With those savages?”
“I was doing fine before your man showed up.” He said this as a test to see whether she would balk at the term “your man.” If she was in charge of this community (and he was beginning to think she was), he wanted to know.
“And the girl? How did she lose her sight?” She tried to maintain a casual pose, but Victor could see the tension in her body as she waited for an answer. If he hesitated, or said anything that contradicted what Jenny might have told them, he could become a monster whom they would be obligated to execute for the safety of their own community.
“There was an accident,” Victor said, choosing his words carefully. “That’s what she told me. It happened during the fight at Fairfield.”
“And you weren’t involved in that fight?”
“No,” he answered. “I found her afterward—when they abandoned her.” He hoped this touch of indignation would overshadow his claim not to have been involved in the fight. He needed to stick to the lie he had given Blackburn. If they discovered he had not just been involved in the fight, but had been the cause of it, they might blame him for the consequences.
Cora winced. “Our community and theirs may be part of the same Federation, but that doesn’t mean we do things the same way.”
Victor shrugged. “I’m just telling you what I saw, not looking for a confession.”
“And what brought you to the outskirts of Fairfield?”
Victor took a deep breath. He had not told Blackburn he was fol
lowing the horsemen, and he did not know whether he should tell Cora either. For all he knew, they could be in league with the horsemen. But what about Jenny? Were they interrogating her in some other room? Would she tell them everything he withheld?
He decided it would be wiser to tell the truth than to construct another lie. “I was following someone.”
“You were?”
“I still am—if I ever get out of this place.”
“We won’t keep you long,” Cora said, “as long as you cooperate.”
“Isn’t that what I’m doing?”
“So far. Who were you following?”
Victor told her about the horsemen and how they had kidnapped his brother. He related the major events of his journey since leaving the cabin, all the while wondering what she was making of this tale. Maybe she questioned everyone this way. Maybe this was a “rite of passage” before being allowed into the community.
Cora listened, cocking her head at times to prompt Victor to give a further explanation. When Victor was finished, she said, “Why do you think they took your brother?”
Victor leaned back in his chair. “Damned if I know. It makes no sense—none of this does. If they wanted our food or guns, they had the means to take them whenever they wished. They could have set an ambush for me when I returned to the cabin, but instead they fled.” He was developing his own theory as to what they may have been doing, but he was not ready to share that one with anyone. Not yet.
Cora said, “Maybe they had something else in mind than simply robbing you.”
It was Victor’s turn to cock his head. “What do you know about these horsemen?”
She hesitated.
“Look,” Victor said, “I told you everything you asked. Could you at least—”
“You’d better come with me.” She rose, lifted the lamp, and moved toward the door.
“Why’s that? Where are we going?”
Cora turned back. “If you want to know who they are, you’re not going to find the answers in this room.”
Chapter 18: The Outlier
“Your brother wasn’t the first person they’ve taken,” Cora said as they walked down the hall. Victor lagged a few steps behind her, listening to the click of her heels on the tiled floor. Blackburn was somewhere ahead of them, moving through the intermittent glow of the windows.
“I know,” he said. “Jenny - the blind girl - was going to be one of them.”
She nodded. “They usually stick with children,” she said as they turned down a hall. “Most of them are between the ages of eight and twelve. Some are boys, but most are girls.”
“And why do they say they take them?”
Cora stopped and turned to face him. “They don’t explain themselves to anyone.”
“I thought your Federation had an understanding with this Baron.”
“We do, or at least we did until the kidnappings started. Who knows where things stand since the Fairfield Massacre.”
Victor raised an eyebrow.
Cora shrugged. “That’s what people have started calling it. With Allen Renfrew’s death, the tally of the horsemen is probably close to twenty now.”
They started walking again. The building was like a maze in the darkness.
Victor said, “Let me get this straight. You give them food, and in return they offer protection. But they’re also taking children.”
“That’s about the sum of it.”
“And you’re happy with this arrangement?”
Cora stopped at a door. “Listen,” she said with a sigh, “it’s not as simple as you think.”
“You’re letting them steal your children. Seems pretty simple to me.”
Her gaze hardened. “You may think you have us all figured out, but there’s more going on here than you know. There’s only one question you should be asking yourself right now: Why did they take your brother? All the others were children, but you said your brother is older.”
Victor nodded.
“So why did they kidnap him?” she said. “Why go through all that trouble of tricking you, not to mention breaking their truce with us, for someone his age? He’s the outlier here. All the children are about the same age as one another, but that’s where the similarities end. Some are male, some female. Some tall, others short. The only other commonality among them is they are all healthy—they don’t have diseases, mental handicaps, or physical disabilities.”
“So why do they take them? What are they for?”
She paused. “There’s a popular theory that this is just a newer form of human trafficking.”
“I find it hard to believe they’d want my brother as a sex slave.”
She took a deep breath. “Yes, that does seem a stretch, doesn’t it? Besides, if they wanted slaves, it’s hard to imagine they would have to come all this way to get them.”
Victor blinked. “All this way?”
Cora knocked on the door. “It’s easier if I just show you.”
_____
The door opened on what had previously been an office. As they entered the room, Victor saw Blackburn digging through the contents of his backpack.
“You prick,” Victor said, striding into the room. Blackburn spun around, ready for a fight, but Cora stepped between them.
“Gentlemen!” she said. She faced Victor, spreading her hands against his chest. What was that smell? Citrus? He hadn’t smelled citrus in ages.
“If you want to fight,” she said, “wait till we’re done and then you can take it outside. I can even call a meeting, if you want, so everyone can see it. And why not take bets with rations while we’re at it?”
Victor, breathing heavily now, kept his gaze on Blackburn. “What are you looking for?” he said. “Think I brought a bomb in here?”
“I was doing my job, asshole,” Blackburn answered. He pointed his finger at Victor. “Besides, you could afford to show a little gratitude. If I hadn’t shown up when I did, where would you be now?”
“I could have handled them.”
“I would have liked to see you try.”
“Are you done?” Cora asked, looking from one man to the other. “Can we behave like grownups again?”
Victor stepped back and straightened his shirt. Blackburn visibly relaxed, though he did not take his eyes off Victor. The radio crackled with a question. “All good in here,” he said into it.
“Victor,” Cora said, “would you get the door?”
Once the door was closed, Victor took a second look around the room. Papers were scattered across the desk, but his attention was drawn mostly to the marker board on the wall beside the desk. It appeared to be a bird’s-eye-view of the county, filled with notes such as “Bridge out” or “Traffic pile-up,” along with the names of nearby Federation towns. A map spread on the edge of the desk suggested to Victor they must have started by drawing things as they used to be, and then correcting them as new information reached them.
“Must be difficult to keep in touch,” he said. “What do you do, send a postman on an endless circuit through your little empire?”
“It’s called the Federation,” Blackburn answered.
“Call it whatever you want, it’s too big.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I mean,” and Victor stepped toward the map so he could gesture with his finger, “these towns are…what…thirty miles apart? Think how long it would take just to receive word if one of the other towns gets attacked. You’re too decentralized. Ever heard the saying, “He who defends everything, defends nothing”?”
Blackburn and Cora glanced at one another. “What makes you think someone would attack us?” Cora said.
Victor shrugged. “It was Ken Commando over there who went on about how dangerous the world is outside your towns. If they’re all struggling to survive while you have food, it’s just a matter of time before they organize. All it takes is one rabble-rouser and they’ll be at your walls—that’s figurative, of course, since you
don’t have any walls.”
Blackburn stared at him. “Anyone ever tell you you talk too much?”
Victor nearly laughed. “Not usually.”
Cora sighed. “I wish you were wrong. But it’s not the people in the countryside we worry about. They could organize, that’s true, but they haven’t. I’m more concerned about the horsemen we were talking about earlier. So let me ask you a question, Victor, and please be as honest as you can. What will you do to find them?”
Brothers (The Last Colony Book 1) Page 13