“Wow.” Christine smiled. “Thanks for standing up for me. I wish I’d seen that. It warms my heart to think of that smug bastard squirming.”
David, however, did not smile. He said nothing, just watched their exchange intently.
“Don’t thank me yet,” Wiley continued. “I think Mary overheard it all, because when Fran followed Bryson into the living room, Mary told her she didn’t talk to her daughter at all, and so she’d only ever heard Bryson’s side. She said you were a great mother, and maybe Fran should give you more credit, and give Bryson less. Told her she should back up her daughter, no matter what, even if all that wasn’t true.”
Wiley grit his teeth. Another hard part… “Then Fran glared at me and accused me of ‘talking out of school,’ whatever that means. I think she meant I was talking to Mary about their personal crap. I don’t remember doing that, but I might have. No one said I shouldn’t, and Mary knows you more than I do anyway, so why wouldn’t I have?”
“Oh, man.” Christine frowned. “You aren’t kicked out, are you? I can talk to her, and—”
Wiley shook his head and interrupted, “No. Not yet, at least. I just walked back into the kitchen, then stood leaning on the island where I can keep an eye on Bryson. Just watched him. Watched him watching me. He started to squirm, pretty quick, and then left.”
A creaking floorboard behind Christine drew Wiley’s eyes—Fran, coming down the stairs and around the corner. She caught sight of Wiley, and for a half-second, glared. Then, her expression flatlined, and she said, “Hi, Chrissy. Welcome home. Bryson left, by the way. He…didn’t like the company.”
She shot Wiley another glare, this time openly.
Christine said, “Really? I’m surprised you let him leave, and didn’t kick out the company. You know, because Bryson can do no wrong.”
Fran sighed, openly. “Yeah, well. You should have seen the look on his face when I let him leave. He kept inching toward the door and announcing again that he was leaving. When he stepped through the door, he looked so sad. It broke my heart to let that man go. He’s a great provider, and you need that in your life, sweetie.”
Christine frowned. “Fran, I do not need a good provider. I need a good man, and he isn’t that. Why’d you let him go, instead of kicking out…I presume it was Wiley? He was the only ‘company’ around.”
Wiley glanced at her. She hadn’t revealed that she knew about the argument, which she could only have heard from Wiley. She didn’t drop dimes…
“No, Mary was here, too. Let’s just say that Mary and I had a talk, and it made me think about a few things. That’s all.”
Christine cocked her head, and even though Wiley had already told her, she asked, “Oh? And what did she say?”
Fran shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. It was private. Anyways, Wiley, will you help me get the food set up?”
Wiley said, “Yeah, sure.” It was the least he could do, given that he’d half-expected her to give him the boot and beg her golden-boy Bryson to stay, pretty please, with a cherry on top. That old woman was made of iron, it seemed, with her own moral code that she actually lived by, unlike most of the hypocrites out there with their fake codes they never bothered to follow. Much like in prison, Wiley mused. A different code, but one they lived by. Wiley had a lot of friends in prison, people he had often trusted with his life, but would have never trusted with his money or his wife.
Ha.
That thought brought a grin to his face.
Fran smiled back, thinking it was meant for her, and headed to the kitchen. Wiley turned around to follow her. “Later, Chrissy.”
Fuck you again, Officer Douchebag.
As his foot hit the floor, though, a high-pitched bang echoed in the distance. Wiley instantly recognized the sound of a .45-caliber handgun going off, somewhere outside. The bang was followed, a second later, by four more in rapid succession.
Orien, standing like a wallflower off to one side in the living room, bend down and looked around. “Damn, that has to be close.” Adrenaline made his tone higher-pitched than usual.
David, also crouching, said, “Copy that. Let’s roll. You folks stay here. I’ll be back.” His tone made it clear it was a command, not a request, and in a second, he and Orien reached the door, glanced outside, then sprinted toward the car, running as low to the ground as they could, as more shots rang out.
No thanks, Officer Douchey.
Wiley, frowning, said, “Yeah, he’s not our boss. If something is coming our way, we need to know before it gets here. I’m going to look.” He looked at Christine. If she were as strong as he suspected, she’d want to come, too. Just to know if her kids were in danger. He said, “Are you coming with?”
Fran glared at him. “Are you kidding? She has kids. Why the hell would she run toward the gunshots? She’s staying here.”
Christine immediately said, “Are you kidding? Wiley’s right, and you’re not my boss, Fran. Hell yeah, I’m coming.”
Wiley smiled. He’d been right—Fran was not the only woman made of iron, in that family.
Fran said, “But what if you got hurt? What if it’s that mob, or something? Your kids need you.”
Christine said in a lower voice, “Fran. Listen. Take my kids to the basement. You know…the basement. It’ll protect them, and you. But I keep my kids safer if we know ahead of time what’s coming, and I don’t trust David to tell us. I swear, if it gets hairy, I’ll run home.”
As Christine headed for the door, not waiting for an answer, Fran rushed to a basket on the runner-table beside the stairwell and pulled out some kind of box. “Here, take the walkie-talkie, and you keep in touch. Swear it.”
“I will, Fran.” Christine snatched the radio and shoved it into her pocket.
Wiley raced by her, keys in hand, and bolted out the door. He agreed with Christine, though—cops couldn’t be trusted if something bad was going down, out there.
46
David slammed the brakes, skidding to a halt twenty yards from a familiar farmhouse, the corner of which was ablaze. A dozen people were racing to and fro with water buckets, forming a chain to the house. More people were frantically hacking with saws at copper tubing, wide at the top and narrowing as it descended down into the house. Others stood in a circle, nearby, looking down.
David didn’t wait for Orien to unbuckle. He flung his SUV’s door open and raced to the cluster of people, shoving one aside.
A man lay on his back, chest oozing crimson across most of its surface. The face was a familiar one: the farmer he’d helped with his wellhead problem.
One of the men nodded to David like he knew him. “Officer Kelley. Shotgun.”
Yeah, that much was obvious. A cold rage built in his gut. “Who did it?”
“Bandits. Refugees. Same thing,” the farmhand said as Orien caught up. “They snuck in and were looting the boss’s root cellar. He heard them and came out, and one of the bandits unloaded a double-barrel into him. Some of us heard the shot and came running with rifles. To distract us, one threw a Molotov cocktail at the house. Eight of them got away. Four didn’t.”
Orien asked, “Is his wife okay?”
The man grunted. “Not hurt. Not okay. She’s in the fire brigade. Tough old bird. She got one of them, herself, with her husband’s rifle.”
The sound of tires on gravel made David turn to look over his shoulder. Damn. Fran’s car halted in a little dust cloud, and Christine and Wiley came out. What the hell were they doing there? “Orien, keep them back.”
It was too late, though. The two were sprinting toward him. Wiley looked David in the eyes. “Bandits?”
David nodded. “Yeah. They’re gone, now, though.”
Wiley replied, “They’ll be back, with more people and more guns. They know we have food, now. And they killed once, already. It’ll be easier next time.”
David frowned. Wiley sounded certain of that. It set off his “cop alarm.” That man was hiding something.
The farmhand sa
id, “Damn straight, they’ll be back. Unless we go gun them down, right damn now. Before they can report back to whatever shithole camp they got.”
This elicited a growing murmur of support and outrage. David looked around at their grim faces. Half held guns. It would be a massacre.
He said, “I can’t allow that. You’ll do no such thing. They’re running, now, not coming back. It would be murder, and I can’t abide that in my town.”
Wiley muttered, “Good luck with that, then.”
Christine snarled, her lip curling back. “Are you mad? Of course they’re coming back. They’re starving, and we have food. How many farms are outside the barricades? Twenty? Forty?”
David held up both hands. “Whoa. Stop and think. You all have families to think of. If you run off and get a few of you killed, who cares for them? I’m not here to eat donuts. Orien and I will form a posse, single people without kids only, and we’ll handle it. You do not want to kill people yourselves. Trust me on that.”
David thought briefly of the nightmares he’d been suffering ever since he’d had to kill a man in self-defense, but shoved those troubling images aside.
The farmhands’ rising, angry voices faded a bit, but most looked down, breaking eye contact. It was working… It seemed he’d earned enough respect from the farmers that they were going to do it his way. Thank goodness, because he hadn’t relished the thought of arresting any of his own people.
That thought jarred him. His people? When had he started thinking of them like that? He looked at Orien and said, “Gather up volunteers for the posse. Make sure they don’t have wedding rings on, and ask about kids. No parents on this one.”
Orien nodded and left the circle.
Wiley said, “Better hurry. If they pass the word, we’ll have a problem.”
Christine said, “We don’t have time for this. Just get some trucks and let’s go. My kids are here, and I don’t want an army of bandits in my town.”
David felt the moment slipping from him. He had to act fast, if he wanted to keep this under control. “Wiley, Christine, this does not involve you. Leave my crime scene, right now, or I will place you both under arrest for interfering.”
He stared Wiley in the eyes, unwavering. Seconds ticked by. David decided to give them a three-count before the cuffs went on, and felt certain Wiley knew exactly how those felt.
Just before David got to three, Wiley looked down, breaking eye contact. “Come on, Chrissy. He means it. Let’s go before Officer Duffy here arrests the wrong people.”
“But—”
Wiley cut her off. “He’ll do it, and it’ll slow him down. For your kids, let’s go.”
She grumbled, but let Wiley lead her away. David watched as they got into the car. She stomped the gas pedal, wheels spinning gravel in an arc behind Fran’s car, and they drove away going entirely too fast.
When David stepped from the circle, he spotted Orien across the yard with easily two dozen people, yet the fire brigade was in full swing, still. More people were wandering in through the fields, or riding in on horses, most of them armed. Even some vehicles were pulling into the drive. They were probably neighbors, and others who’d heard the shooting, perhaps.
He organized the volunteers that qualified by his rules, and split them into three groups of about ten, two groups in vehicles and the remainder on horseback. The fleeing refugees were on foot, so they’d have no problem catching up. Two minutes later, they were sworn into the posse. The cars, he sent along the flanks, while the horses, he instructed to chase the bandits directly.
That done, he strode back to his SUV, and he and Orien climbed in. As his seatbelt buckle clicked into place, an odd but familiar hiss caught his ear. He and Orien both looked at each other, then at the dash-mounted radio. The signal meter flickered…
Then it spiked into the green zone as it latched onto a broadcast. David immediately recognized Captain Muller’s voice.
“…all units of the Denver Police Department on T-A-D to outlying areas. Repeat, Charlie-One Actual to all T-A-D units of D-P-D. Be advised, the mission has failed. Return to your assigned precincts for reassignment, immediately. This is a direct order. I won’t sugar-coat it—things are bad. Really bad. Denver needs you. Your city needs you. Return immediately to your pre-event precinct for urgent reassignment. Over.”
A moment later, the broadcast repeated. It was obviously a recording. Halfway through the second repeat, as David sat in stunned silence, the signal broke and the radio went silent, signal strength meter falling to nothing.
He looked at Orien and found his partner looking back, mouth open into a little “O” shape.
After the silence grew awkward, David muttered, “Well, then. Orders are orders…”
Orien nodded. “Indeed. So, why are we still sitting here, instead of getting back to civilization?”
Why, indeed? David sat, unmoving, but couldn’t make himself start the engine.
Orien said, in a quiet voice, “Maybe it has something to do with a certain woman whose mother we’re staying with?”
“What?” David blinked. He hadn’t thought of her at all. Had he?
Orien shrugged. “I see how you look at her. She’s a firecracker. You like ’em spicy. And she thinks you have some kind of duty to this town and its people, now that you’re here. Am I wrong? Maybe that’s coloring your decisions.”
“No, I…” David snapped. He had been about to say he didn’t give two hoots about what Christine thought he should do. But was that so? He’d stayed in that stupid town with its stupider mayor for nearly two months. He had on-demand access to a full tank of gas. He could have left already, yet he’d stayed. And now, he didn’t want to start that damn engine. The worst part of it was that he wasn’t certain Orien was wrong, either. “It’s… I don’t let it color my thinking.”
Without pause, Orien replied, “You didn’t deny feeling responsible for this hick town.”
“Well, aren’t I?” David felt a sort of indignation welling up, angry and rebellious. “I took on the badge for Weldona. Besides, there’s a horde of criminals coming. The refugees. That’s conspiracy to commit armed robbery, and there’s the murder, and you and I are the only ones in between them and these people.”
“So? You heard the orders.”
David shook his head. “I heard a recording. We don’t know how old that was. The situation could have changed, for all we know. Besides, the captain would understand.”
Orien was quiet for a moment. Then, he said, “So you’ve decided. You’re staying.”
Stunned, David couldn’t think of anything else to say. He had indeed made a decision. Just not the one he’d expected himself to make. Wordlessly, he started the SUV and pulled away, heading after the posse. It took a moment to figure out what he wanted to say, but then he told Orien, “You do as you wish. You can take Old Bessie, here, if you leave. But I’m staying for these people, at least until this crisis is fricking over with.”
Orien let out a deep sigh.
“What?” David glanced over, only to find Orien staring at him with narrowed eyes.
Orien shrugged. “Seems like the crisis won’t be over any time soon, that’s all. Until it’s over, that could be a while.”
David pushed down on the gas pedal even harder. Orien was right, of course. The crisis wasn’t ending any time soon, it seemed all too clear.
By the time she pulled into Fran’s driveway, Christine had not yet calmed down. Not one iota. How dare David dismiss her like that? This was her town, dammit. She’d brought him in, not the other way around. Something happening in Weldona as important as that was her concern, too. She realized she was clutching the steering wheel tightly enough that her fingers were stiff and ached. It took conscious effort to release her death-grip on the wheel, one finger at a time.
“You know what?” She looked at Wiley, who hadn’t yet left the car as she’d sat there lost in her own thoughts.
“What’s that?”
�
��I’m not ready to deal with Fran, yet. I need a walk. Just let her know I’ll be back in a bit, okay?”
Wiley shook his head. “Nothin’ doing. I’m not letting you walk around with refugees sneaking around.”
She pointed vaguely west. “They’re out there, not in here. Officer Duffy, or whatever you called David, is chasing them back now.”
“Whatever. I’m coming with you, then.” He met her gaze, and didn’t flinch.
Christine finally let out a sigh, and climbed from the car. If he wanted to follow her around to make sure that she, a delicate friggin’ flower, didn’t get her pedals plucked, then whatever. She headed down the driveway to the road, ignoring the sound of Wiley’s shoes crunching on gravel right behind her. Well, that was okay. With everything going on around them, actually, it was reassuring to have him with her, even if it was pointless.
David tried to ignore Orien’s exaggerated flailing around inside the SUV cabin as they bounced across the grassy landscape of a fallow farm field, but it was distracting nonetheless. He was just about to snap at his partner, when he spotted a crowd up ahead, with four vehicles parked nearby and horses milling around.
“There they are,” Orien said, not-so-helpfully.
“Mm.” David slowed and pulled up beside the other vehicles, careful not to spook the horses, and then climbed out in unison with Orien. He got about three steps toward the group when he saw what else was there with them, and damn near fell as he missed his step.
“What the fu…” But he knew already what it was. A slaughter, that’s what. He gulped, then fixed his gaze on a familiar face: the farmhand’s. A man with a family, he recalled; so what the hell was he doing out there?
David focused on keeping his voice from quaking as he said, “Report. What happened here?”
The farmhand, frowning, walked over to David. “I just pulled up. I’ve questioned the riders who caught up with the bandits, though. They tried to get the assholes to stop. Every rider sings the same song—they demanded the bandits lay down their arms, but you know, they’re bandits. They started shooting. Our people shot back. We won. Simple, and tragic.”
Inception of Chaos: A Post-Apocalyptic EMP Survival Story Page 29