by Connor Mccoy
Angelica tidied up the kitchen, washing the bowl and pan, drying them and putting them away. When she was done, they left the house and crossed over to the library. They entered through the back and Glen saw blood on one of the columns. So that was where Terror had injured himself. What had frustrated him so much that he’d felt the need to damage his hand on the marble?
Terror was somewhat of an enigma to Glen. On the one hand, he inspired loyalty among his troops. On the other, he seemed to have uncontrollable spells of rage. He’d appeared to be an understanding and compassionate man until he’d bashed Glen on the skull. He sought treatment for a brutalized woman but also was probably the perpetrator of the violence against her. Terror talked a good game, but obviously was emotionally unstable. The townspeople stayed, but they didn’t look happy about it.
But this last point wasn’t really fair. They had been under a great deal of stress today. It wasn’t too surprising that they weren’t dancing in the streets. You’d think that there would be a feeling of relief and maybe mild celebration after winning the battle, but perhaps too many people had died for them to feel anything but grief.
Terror led the way into the room where Glen first had seen him and took his place at the head of the table on the raised platform at the end of the room. Glen waited for Terror to ask him to sit before he chose a chair toward the middle of the table. Angelica sat on the opposite side of the table but up next to Terror.
A youngish man came into the room and hurried up to the table. He handed a paper to Angelica, nodded to Terror in a kind of salute and left at the same quick pace. Angelica read the note and nodded.
“Report,” Terror said.
“Tyrell, we were lucky. Only three fatalities. Some twenty more wounded. Two of ours captured. We have four of theirs. All in all, not a bad exchange.” She folded the paper and set it on the table in front of her, resting her hands on top of it.
Glen was surprised that Angelica had used Terror’s given name, and he hadn’t so much as flinched. She had some level of authority. He couldn’t imagine any of the others he had met calling the man by anything but Terror.
“Do we know how many they lost?” Terror asked.
“Davis counted five carried away, but there could have been more he didn’t see,” she said.
“So we came out ahead,” Terror said. “Good. Now we get to plan our retaliation.”
“So, we attack them again? Tit for tat again? Come on, Tyrell. We can do better than this. Either ignore them or annihilate them.” Angelica stood and paced the length of the table. “The status quo is ridiculous. They come here and kill a couple of us, we go there and kill a few of them. And then two or three of them will ask to join us, and a few of us will leave. Not all of our deserters go to them, but a number do. Meanwhile, we pick each other off. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Are you saying my leadership doesn’t make sense?” Terror growled. “Because if you are…” He left the sentence unfinished.
Angelica rolled her eyes. “Don’t get your panties in a twist, Tyrell. No one is challenging your leadership. I’m just saying that, in my opinion, you spend too much time and manpower on those people. Bring them into the fold, create an alliance, or get rid of them. They are a distraction that you don’t need.”
Glen wondered if they even would notice if he left the room. He was superfluous to the conversation. Who possibly could be treating the injured? Hopefully, it wasn’t the drunken doctor. He had no patience for this self-centered foolishness when there must be wounded to be treated. He stood up.
Both Terror and Angelica turned to look at him. The look on Terror’s face was incredulous, Angelica sneered. He could feel them both willing him to sit back down. He did not.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Terror asked.
“You must have wounded to be treated,” Glen said, realizing as he did so that he’d made a mistake. He should have said “we.” “We must have wounded,” he amended himself.
“You’ll not be treating the wounded, if there are any,” Terror said. “I’m indebted to you, so I cannot kill you, but I don’t think I’ll be keeping you here.”
Glen wondered what he had done to give Terror the impression that he was untrustworthy. He couldn’t think of anything. Sure, Glen didn’t accept Terror as psychologically stable, but he’d been doing a pretty good job of keeping that under his hat. Maybe he’d let something slip.
“Why is that?” he asked.
“It’s clear to us that you were sent here as a spy,” Angelica said. “The attack on our borders came too soon after your arrival to be a coincidence. Therefore, you must be one of them.”
“But I just killed one of them,” Glen said. “How could I do that if I was one of them?”
“What proof do we have that the woman is dead?” Terror asked. “It could have been a set-up to make us trust you more. We leave, and she gets up and takes off the body armor. She’ll be sore for a few days, but nothing she can’t handle. You could have staged the entire scene.”
“I can’t tell you how much I wish that were true. I’d be much more comfortable with myself if I thought she was alive. It doesn’t come easily for a doctor to kill.” It hadn’t seemed so at the time, he had acted on instinct. But now there was this horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had broken the Hippocratic Oath. He had done harm. The one harm there was no coming back from.
But as he looked at Terror and Angelica conferring, he realized he’d better focus on keeping himself alive and worry about his immortal soul later. “Listen,” he said, “I told you why I came here. Christian needed medicine. That was all. By this time, he’s either dead or on his way to recovery, and hopefully far away from here. The others have no ties to me. Their plan had been to rob and kill me, before Christian was attacked by a bear that is. After that, staying alive was the priority. If you let me go, I will never darken your door again.”
“Or,” Angelica said, “we keep him captive and use him as our town doctor. One of these days our current doctor is going to drink himself to death.” She stopped pacing and sat back down at the table. She tapped her knuckles on the wood. “Sit down,” she said. “Let’s talk.”
Terror gave her a sharp look, but Glen sat. Staying alive, moment by moment, was the goal. Neither of these two seemed reliably stable, so placating them seemed the best plan of inaction for the moment. When talks broke down, he’d make a run for it.
Chapter Eight
Sally had vanished back upstairs after the three of them had completed their search, so Mia went looking for her. She found Sally in a room on the second floor overlooking the street. She was standing in the gloom to the side of the window, frowning down at something. Mia approached, and Sally turned away from the window and met her halfway.
But Mia was curious, so she sidestepped Sally and crossed to look out the window herself. “What were you looking at,” she asked. There were people on the street, sweeping up after the battle. One woman across the street was nailing a board over a broken window. Down the road, a small group of people turned the corner and disappeared out of sight. Was that Glen?
She turned to Sally and raised an eyebrow.
“Nothing,” Sally said. “Just checking out the street to see if there’s a way for us to get out of here before nightfall.” She shrugged casually.
Mia thought she was just a little too casual. If that had been Glen headed back to toward the library, why wouldn’t Sally want her to know that? Was she losing her nerve?
The women met up with Christian on the first floor. “I think we’d better stay here until nightfall,” he said. “Now that the fighting has stopped, there are just too many people around.”
They found a room at the back of the building that must once have been the staff room. There were a couple of overstuffed chairs and a couch placed around a coffee table, and a TV in the corner. It was a reasonably comfortable room. The three of them set their weapons just inside the door and dropped into th
e vacant seats. Mia took off her boots and curled her feet up underneath her.
Mia woke to the sound of people coming into the pharmacy. She sat up quickly and put her hand gently over Sally’s mouth. Sally woke instantly, her eyes wide open. Mia put her finger to her lips, went to Christian and woke him quietly as well. Then she went to the door and listened. It sounded like a cleaning crew of some kind. There was chatter and then someone trying to get the others to simmer down.
She slid out of the break room and took a peak in the back. There were people out there too, pulling weeds and sweeping the staff parking area. She slipped back in with the others. “Our best bet is the basement, I think,” Mia said. “But we’d better hurry. And make sure you have everything.”
She picked up her weapon and her boots and slipped back into the hall and across to the basement door. When they had checked the basement door earlier, she’d noticed it had creaked. She wondered if she should yank it open fast or crack it open slowly. When Sally and Christian were standing in the door of the break room, she cracked it open slowly, just far enough to squeeze through and slipped in. Sally followed, and then Christian.
Christian closed the door carefully, and they creeped down the stairs. They didn’t dare turn on the lights, so they moved through the gloom. There were grimy windows at head height here and there, and Mia caught sight of legs and feet. She hoped no one thought to bend over and look in at them. There was a storage room in the far back, around the corner from a work area, and they headed for that.
There were no windows in the storage room, and Christian risked turning on his flashlight. He swept the beam around the room, stacked with shelves like a library, but full of cardboard boxes instead of books. Scattered among the cardboard were plastic storage bins. Mia wondered if she’d fit in one of the larger ones.
Christian walked the room, identifying three hiding spots. One under a table at the back, behind some boxes; one in a niche created by a shelving unit that didn’t span the distance wall to wall; and one in an empty spot on the bottom shelf of a unit that was at the back, behind two other shelves. Sally slipped in under the table, Mia took the bottom shelf and assumed Christian had moved into the niche.
Then they waited.
They could hear footsteps overhead, and even the sound of people climbing the stairs to the second floor. Mia wondered why they had chosen today for pharmacy house cleaning. Maybe it was a post-gunfight ritual? She shrugged. Who knew why these crazy Stepford people did what they did? She didn’t.
She was cramped, curled on her side, with no space to stretch her legs. She slid them out into the aisle between the shelves, figuring she could pull them back in if she heard someone open the door. It was dark and cold, but thankfully not damp. She wondered how long they would have to wait these people out. Maybe they wouldn’t even come to the basement. But they did eventually. The sound of the basement door creaking open reached her ears, and then the footsteps down the stairs. There were at least four rooms in the basement, five, if you counted their storage room hiding place. Maybe they wouldn’t clean every room.
Every contact point between her body and the board beneath her was aching by the time the door to their hiding place finally opened. Mia slid her legs back onto the shelf and curled into the smallest possible ball. A set of footsteps came maybe five paces into the room, paused and then went out again, the door closing. Was that it?
But then two sets of feet approached, and she held her breath again.
“This hasn’t been touched since the last incursion,” a woman said. “Which should mean that it’s clean and we can leave it, what do you think?”
“I don’t know. Half the reason we do this is to make sure no one is hiding in the town. This would be an excellent place to hide.” This voice was male but seemed young.
“Let’s ask the boss,” the woman said. The door closed, and their footsteps receded and then climbed the stairs.
“Shit,” Sally said from underneath the table. “We need to get out of here.”
“Do you think they saw you, Christian?” Mia slid off her shelf, grateful to be able to stand and stretch.
“I don’t know,” Christian said. “Why don’t you go over to the door and see what you can see. Take my flashlight.”
Mia retrieved his flashlight with a minimum of bumping into things and went over by the door. “Oh,” she said. “No, I can’t see either of you, but we left footprints in the dust. So, they know someone came in and didn’t go out again.”
“Fuck!” Christian said, coming out of his hiding place. “We are well screwed. They’ll be looking for us.”
“Can we do something to muddle them?” Sally appeared from behind a shelf. “Like, erase the footprints, so they think they imagined them?”
“If there was only one of them, maybe. But there are two. They’ll back each other up,” Christian said. “No, I think our best bet is just to get out of here and hole up until the search dies down. Then start looking for Glen again.”
“I think he’s back toward the library now,” Mia said, looking at Sally meaningfully. “I think I spotted him from the upstairs window.”
“And you are only telling us now?” Christian asked angrily.
“I wasn’t sure,” Mia said, “but the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced it was him.”
“That doesn’t solve our problem of where to go from here.” Sally said. “And the longer we stand here, the more likely it becomes we’ll be discovered.”
Mia moved to the door, thinking if they cracked it open, they better could hear what was going on and make a plan. But the knob wouldn’t turn. She tugged on it and tried turning it, but it was no good. They were screwed.
“It’s locked,” she said. “We’re stuck in here.”
“Who locks a storage room?” Sally asked. “That’s insane.”
“Maybe it originally was meant to be a cell of some kind,” Christian said. “If the town didn’t originally have a sheriff or police department, they could have designated this room for holding criminals.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” Mia said. “We are good and stuck either way.”
“Not necessarily,” Christian said, pulling a pocket knife from his jeans and stepping to the door. He opened the knife, but instead of a blade, there was an oddly shaped tool. He slid it into the space between the door and the jamb, wiggled it down, and two seconds later had the door open.
Mia turned back as she stepped through the door, “Should we do something about our footprints?” she asked.
“No time,” Christian said. “And I’m not sure what it would accomplish. Come on.”
He led them to the nearest basement window and peered out. “No one out there,” he said. “They all must be at the meeting to decide what to do about us.”
The window was a narrow rectangle, high up on the wall, level with the ground outside. It didn’t open, and Mia wondered if they were going to risk the noise of breaking the glass. But Christian pulled out his pocket knife again and opened the screwdriver tool. It took him less than five minutes to twist out the four screws and remove the window.
“You first,” he said to Mia and created a stirrup with his hands. Mia stepped into it and found herself hoisted up and out. She wormed forward onto the gravel and grass, then turned to grab their gear as Christian handed it out to her.
Then came Sally. Mia grabbed her under her arms and dragged her forward until Sally’s knees came through the window and she could crawl.
“How are you going to get out?” Mia whispered to Christian. “There’s no one to give you a boost.”
“I’ll manage,” he said.
And manage he did. He jumped up and grabbed something at ceiling height and then jackknifed his legs through the window. Mia grabbed his hands and helped pull his head and shoulders through.
“What did you grab onto?” she asked once he was safely through the window and they were picking up their things.
“A pipe of som
e sort,” Christian said. “I’m lucky it held my weight. That could have been a disaster.”
“There’s no way to disguise how we got out, is there?” Sally asked. “Only they are going to know which way we’re going.”
“Can’t worry about that now,” Christian said, grabbing Mia’s hand. “Let’s go.” They ran bent over, staying low, although Mia wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as if they were running through tall grass or anything. Anyone looking was going to be able to see them regardless.
They ducked around a corner and then across the street directly behind Main Street. There was a tire shop on the corner, a large working area with a warehouse behind.
“There,” Christian said, pointing. “We’ll go there. I imagine there are a bunch of hiding places in there.”
They ran for the warehouse, skidding over the gravel in the parking lot, but slowing as they reached the door. Christian went to open it. It was unlocked, so his tools stayed in his pocket. He cracked the door slowly, but hearing nothing from the interior of the metal building, he led the girls inside.
Chapter Nine
“I can’t kill him,” Terror said, “he saved my life not two hours ago. I can’t break the code.” He slammed his hand down on the table.
“Then accept him in or turf him out. We haven’t got the manpower to keep a constant eye on him. And I’m not in favor of keeping him locked in my house.” Angelica leaned across the table and grabbed his hand. She squeezed hard, and Terror looked at her in surprise.
“I need you to focus, Tyrell,” she said, her fingers tightening until his knuckles ground together. “That man is hearing too much and seeing too much. If you think he’s a spy from the camp, then you have to get rid of him. Send him back before he sees something that could really damage you.”
“He’s a surgeon. You do see what an advantage it would be to have a surgeon?” He looked at her, ignoring the pain in his hand and willing her to see things his way. After all, didn’t it always go his way in the end?