“I’m going to make sure that we’re secure, and I might be a while. Stay on your guard—there’s probably more where these three came from.”
Arthur merely nodded, never taking his eyes from his wife. He stroked her hand, the gesture one of pure will. If prayer could save a life, then Gwen would live.
Ben drug the corpse of the man in the kitchen out behind the barn, leaving a long smear of bright red blood in his wake. He did the same with the man he’d shot on the front porch. He walked the perimeter of the property, checking on the ponies and poking his lantern into every square inch of the barn.
It was after 3:00 when he was finally satisfied that they were alone. He joined the others in the living room.
Gwen actually looked better.
“We cleaned it and dressed it as best we could. She’ll need stitches in the morning,” Arthur said.
Yeah, Ben thought, if she makes it that long. He pulled Alice into his arms. He kissed her forehead. It felt cool against his lips, and he took that as a good sign.
They sat there in silence for a long time, incapable of eye contact. Finally, Alice spoke up.
“Who?” she said. “Who did this?”
“I think it’s pretty fucking clear,” Pastor Lawton spat back. There was blood on his hands and cheeks, and his red-rimmed eyes were feverish with anger and despair. “With God as my witness, I’ll take the fucker’s head for this! I’m going to kill the Godless bastard!”
Ben shook his head. “No way. You have to stay here, Arthur. Your wife needs you.”
“I…don’t…care! That little girl is my affirmation, Ben. She’s all we have left, don’t you see? Without her, Gwen and I might as well just die. It’s as simple as that. We may as well just shrivel up and die, because without Lucy there’s nothing left for us.”
“What do you mean?” Alice said. “Your affirmation of what?”
“That we’re still people,” Arthur hissed. “That there’s still a sense of rightness in the world. Jesus, Alice, that there’s…that there’s still hope.”
“Gwen will die without you,” Ben replied. His voice was soft and even, and his eyes never blinked as he studied his friend. “You know that, Arthur. What good will any of this be if Lucy comes home and she doesn’t have her grandma to help her along?”
Arthur’s lips pursed in an expression of pure sorrow. Jesus, what a spot to be in! “I know it,” he whispered. “I know it, Ben. But what do you expect me to do? She’s my little girl!”
“She’s our little girl too,” Alice replied. She took Arthur’s hand.
He nodded. “And I know that. You two have been so good to her. So good and so kind. She loves you every bit as much as she loves her grandma and me.”
He looked up, an exhausted old man on the verge of losing everything. “So what happens next? If I stay here with Gwen, what happens to Lucy?”
“Only one thing to do, Arthur,” Ben replied. “I’m going to Atlanta. I need to have a word with Roan.
THIRTY-FOUR
Atlanta’s fractured skyline loomed in the distance. Like Jacksonville, what remained of the city was sliding back into the dust. The place looked utterly deserted. The Peachtree Towers had toppled over, and much of the top half of The Four Seasons had been sheared off in the military operations The Human Accord had carried out in the weeks following the Reset. Like a pair of chipped canine teeth in gums that had grown soft, One Atlantic Center and the Bank of American Plaza now bookended enormous piles of broken concrete and steel.
“At least there’s something left,” Alice said. They studied the city through binoculars, hidden behind mounds of concrete that had once been part of the freeway near Buckhead. It was an impassible route into the city, with precipitous drops every hundred feet or so as entire sections of the overpass had vanished.
Ben merely nodded. He’d ventured as far south as the outskirts of Orlando’s fallout zone. No evidence remained that people had ever existed there, let alone that it had once been home to the world’s most popular resort. Where Orlando had stood there was now an enormous crater filled with mounds of swirling ash and pockets of muddy water. There was no rubble, no skeletal remains that stubbornly proclaimed: Here! Once, a damned long time ago, men had lived right here! It had reminded Ben of the sand dunes outside of Lakeview, back when Mr. Brown had taken the kids on a field trip to the fossil beds along Oregon’s border with Nevada.
“We should stay off the freeway,” Alice said. “We won’t see him, but he’ll see us coming from a mile away. It looks empty, but Roan’s got men positioned throughout the city.”
Ben sighed. He touched her cheek. “I don’t like you being here, Alice,” he said. It was probably the fiftieth time he’d made the plea with her; they were almost at the point of no return. “Please, honey. Won’t you please just go back and look after Gwen? You can…you can scout that drug store we passed in Rochelle. Maybe get her some antibiotics, in case that blade wasn’t clean.”
Alice shook her head. “I’d never let you come here on your own, Ben. You know I wouldn’t do that. I know the city. I know where Roan lives, where he and his men are staying.”
Ben nodded. “But I don’t want you anywhere near that place, Alice. When the time is right, I’ll present him with our offer. And I’ll be doing it alone. I need your word on that.”
She forced a smile and nodded her assent. He kissed her forehead. “Come on. Let’s get down from here.”
They picked their way cautiously through the rubble, descending from the overpass until they found themselves on Peachtree Road. On the surface streets, the destruction wasn’t nearly as bad. Many structures remained largely intact, and they took their care as they made their way toward the city’s core, darting between rusting vehicles left in the streets.
Near dark, they slowed their pace.
“Let me get a look around,” Ben said. They had ducked down an unmarked alley, perhaps three or four miles from the city’s core, where they found came across an unlocked gate in the middle of a high fence. Ben nudged it wide and stepped through, his pistol in hand; he had been delighted to find himself standing on the back patio of what had once likely been a charming little café or coffee shop. He ducked inside and, when he was certain the building was empty, waved for Alice to follow. She latched the gate behind her.
“This looks like a decent place,” she said. “Oh my God, Ben! Will you look at that?”
A wooden box near the door held a stack of yellowing paper menus. Grinning, Ben grabbed a couple and handed one to Alice.
They scanned the menu, salivating over the options.
“Eggs benedict! Bacon and hashbrowns and…oh my God, Alice—sourdough toast!”
“Swiss cheese quiche! Country fried steak!”
“Biscuits and pepper gravy! Orange juice! Criminy, I think I might trade the entire farm right now for a big glass of orange juice!”
“Scones with marmalade! Lattes and mochas and espresso!” Alice gushed.
A wistful expression formed on Ben’s face. “Mochas. You know, I’ve had those before. If I remember correctly, they were pretty good.”
Alice stopped reading and looked up at Ben.
“What?” he said, noting the incredulity in her expression. “They were chocolate, right?”
With a frown, she replaced the menu and wrapped her arms around him. “I’m sorry, Ben. Forgive me. I forget sometimes. I so often forget.”
“Forget what?”
“That you were just a kid when all of this happened. You really had coffee like that just a few times?”
Ben pulled back and held up the appropriate number of fingers. “Three, to be exact. We never had stuff like that back on the ranch. And I was still so new at my job back then and, well, I just hadn’t spent much time thinking about things like…like coffee.”
Alice kissed him. “There’ll be time again, Ben. In the future, when things improve, there’ll be time for you yet to experience the good of what we had before.” She smi
led. “When we get out of here, I’ll make you a mocha myself. That’s a promise. I don’t know how I’ll find the ingredients, but I promise that I’ll make it happen.”
They scarfed a quick dinner of dried fruit and deer jerky and, when darkness fell and the temperature dropped, they huddled for warmth beneath the old front counter.
“How does it feel?” Ben whispered, when they were both very near sleep.
“What’s that?”
“To be home. How does it feel?”
Alice sighed. “It’s not home anymore, Ben. We have to remember that, or it could go pretty badly for us. This place…it belongs to somebody else now.”
THIRTY-FIVE
They had made it as far as Piedmont Park—fair progress, by Alice’s reckoning—when they were ambushed. They’d stopped to eat lunch on a little stone bridge, huddling on benches in the shadows of a decomposing gazebo. A few scrawny birds paddled about in the murky water lazing by beneath the bridge.
“There won’t be a front door,” Alice said. “One of the last things Brian discovered was that Roan had seriously fortified the building. He’d taken these enormous steel plates and welded them together, blocking the entire first floor—shutting off the front entrance and any windows that allowed access. He put up razor wire and built guard stations. Our best bet—your best bet, if you still insist on doing this alone—will be to speak with one of his soldiers without getting shot, give him a gift to take inside, and then request an audience. And that’s just what it would be, Ben. Roan fancies himself some sort of royalty.”
“So…where did this guy come from? Do you know his story?”
Alice offered a rueful smile. “He was an accountant, of all things. Before the Reset, he’d been a regular ol’ bean counter for Coca Cola, working a plum job in the primary economy. Just a cog in the machine—an anonymous number cruncher advancing the politics of the era. But he was a little bit different, I suppose. He’d put his hand in the cookie jar and had it chopped off, so to speak, so he wasn’t your average ‘go-along-to-get-along’ corporate drone. Roan is a snake and a thief, a white-collar criminal that had been convicted of embezzlement before serving time in USP Atlanta.”
Ben frowned in confusion.
“It was the old federal prison. The Human Accord torched the place a few hours after the corrections staff walked off the job for good. Civil services simply failed in the months after the Reset. Absenteeism was about 25% in the weeks directly following the attacks. A month later, there was nobody left to keep the streets safe or put out the fires. The world burned, and we just watched it go.
“Most of the jailed starved in their cells. They hadn’t been looked after. The rest, with the exception of a few stragglers like Roan, who had been quartered in a minimum security ‘camp’ outside the fences, died in the fires.”
“That’s just…Jesus, Alice, that’s barbaric!”
Alice finished her smoked catfish and shrugged her shoulders. “What were their options? Open the doors and put them all out on the streets? It would have aggravated an already terrible situation. There was no law, Ben. ‘Survival of the fittest,’ and ‘protect your family.’ Those were the new paradigms. Adding a vicious criminal element to the equation was considered bad public policy. It was easier just to erase the problem.”
“Still…”
“Hey, that’s just one example. After the writing was on the wall, this was maybe in June or July of 2038, HA security forces began a systematic eradication of anybody who had been linked to the marginalized economies. Take that basic Darwinian philosophy and add a dash of Thomas Malthus, maybe a pinch of Hitler, and you had The Human Accord’s end-game strategy: eliminate the unfortunate and let the wealthy rebuild.”
Ben studied the deserted park—the empty city. “I guess it worked.”
Alice grew thoughtful.
“Yes, and no. I mean, look where it put us, am I right? There used to be this great video clip that you could watch online. These two boxers both throw stiff punches. They catch each other flush and wham!” she clapped her hands for emphasis, “both of them hit the canvas! Double knock out—game over. That’s what happened here. That’s where we are. The financial elite couldn’t survive in the world they had created, and they killed so many of the poor that rebuilding wasn’t realistic.
“The Human Accord hadn’t expected such an intense resistance. The country’s largest population centers shifted to the towns and small cities that Calvin hadn’t targeted. For a period of about two months, America had been run from a renovated Holiday Inn in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Places like Tallahassee, Omaha, Des Moines and Flagstaff adopted new and important roles. These were the biggies now, and HA security forces rolled through them like lead-spitting tsunamis. Men, women and children—almost all of them poor—were eliminated in droves as the forces went door to door, neighborhood to neighborhood. Of course, it didn’t help that the detonation in Phoenix had destroyed the military’s biological weapons laboratories. Hundreds of thousands that didn’t fall to bullets lost their lives to VX9, the fastest-killing, human-engineered flu virus the world had ever known.”
“But the people—how long did they stand against The Human Accord?”
“For most of the rest of the year. Militias were formed in almost every population zone with a little size. Some of those groups might still exist today—there’s no way of knowing without a communications grid. That’s part of Roan’s grand plan. He wants to get the phones back online, or at least that’s the rumor.”
“Sounds kind of nice, actually. I wonder if he’s had any success.”
Alice shook her head in disgust. “Roan’s no different than The Human Accord. He uses violence in the same ways they did: to intimidate, to coerce, to terrify. You see, there were three options back then, Ben: fight, die, or hide. The Human Accord swept through and killed most of the survivors. When it was thrown over, warlords like Roan stepped in to finish the job.” Her eyes grew wet at the memory of her husband. “Regardless of how he thinks of himself, he’s no messiah. He’s a petty, angry little man who has fallen into a position of power through blind luck and bully tactics.
“Before the Reset, he’d been a soft-bellied snake. He had a sharp business mind, though, and he had connections. He had money. He used those resources to build his influence in prison. If you needed something from the outside, Roan could get it for you. And that’s not his real name, by the way.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. His given name is Robert Roanicke. He took up with some of the other prisoners that had survived the USP Atlanta fire and built a militia. They defended Buckhead against HA forces, gaining strength with every successful mission. What remained back then of the media first started calling him ‘Roan,’ and the name stuck.
“He outlasted The Human Accord and his army grew. It wasn’t long before he had taken control of East Lake, Ormewood, Bankhead, and Kirkwood. Before the news stations fell into static, he had begun weekly addresses, using propaganda and promising prosperity to those who stood with him against the diminishing strength of The Human Accord.”
“And he won,” Ben said. Roan’s rise to power fascinated him. History was filled with people just like him—ordinary people in the right place at the right time.
Alice smirked. “The Human Accord was stumbling around on dying legs by then. It didn’t take much for Roan’s armies to sweep them up. He burned their dead in a monstrous pyre on the infield of the old baseball stadium. Atlanta reeked for weeks. That smell,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ll never forget it.
“He moved into city hall. Brian said he was working to get the power back online, at least in a few parts of the city. He was trying to get the sewers figured out, too.”
“That doesn’t sound all bad,” Ben said.
“Look, they were selfish efforts, Ben. He doesn’t do them with an eye toward rebuilding—toward making life more bearable for others. He does them so he can feel better. I’m here because I love you, Ben, but also
because, if I can, I want to help those women we left behind in Bickley. If it’s true—if he’s forcing them to bear children against their will—then he’s every bit the monster I knew him to be when his men murdered my husband. He’s a thief and a…well, a cannibal, Ben! I hate admitting that, given what happened to my husband, but there it is.
“He’s an opportunistic parasite that would sooner see Atlanta burned to the ground than flourishing in prosperity.”
A distant thunderclap punctuated her bitter words. Ben looked to the horizon, where storm clouds were massing, rapidly converging on the city.
Ben grinned. “And this is the guy we’re trying to bargain with?”
Alice reached over and pinched his arm playfully. “It was your bright idea, buster. We’d better pray that we don’t get the Talmidge treatment like you saw back there in Bickley.”
Ben nodded somberly. He knelt to stow the remnants of his lunch in his pack. “I don’t know if we have a choice, Alice. You heard Arthur. That little girl is his life. If we didn’t come, he would. You know that.”
Alice nodded. “I admire your courage. Who knows—perhaps he’ll take the seeds and build a beautiful garden, right here in Atlanta. We’ll get Lucy back and maybe things will work out just fine in the end.” Her eyes betrayed her optimism, though, and Ben felt the skin on the back of his neck prickle.
The wind tossed the first smattering of raindrops hard to the Earth. “Better take cover,” Ben said. He looked north—to the city center. When he turned back, Alice was on the ground, gasping for air like a gaffed tarpon.
“Alice!” he cried, scooping her into his arms. Something bit his neck—a sudden vicious pain screaming through him. His fingers, already growing clumsy, clutched at the dart and plucked it free. “Alice!” he croaked, the words all wrong—tumbling from his mouth like syrup. His lips were numb, his vision blurred.
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