Oil Apocalypse Collection

by Lou Cadle

  The two people she cared about were alive and well. So was Wes, who she respected. Relieved, she sat again and tried to gather her thoughts.

  “We have no men down. We have a prisoner up on the second floor, badly injured, cuffed to a pipe in the kitchen. We cleared all the apartments from floors three down to one.”

  “How’s Jackson?” Wes said.

  “I didn’t check again.” She hadn’t wanted to walk back over there to the scene of her crime.

  She knew she should tell someone what she’d done, but who? Wes? Kelly? Jackson hadn’t seemed to know, but she didn’t know for sure. She couldn’t keep it to herself. But she didn’t want to live with the fallout of announcing she’d accidentally shot one of her own team. No one would ever trust her again. People would hate her.

  She hated herself.

  As Wes and Kelly discussed what to do next, she took a step back, letting other people decide everything for now. The main topic of discussion was the three men who had fled from the shoot-out across from the jail and possibly others on the streets. “Should we wait for morning?” someone asked. “We can see better.”

  “What about the rest of us in jail?” Leland asked. “We have weapons for several.”

  Kelly said, “Not until we clear the town. Not until dawn when we can see better and everybody is informed. It isn’t far off.”

  “We’ve been in so long,” Leland said. “You can’t imagine.”

  “I can’t,” Kelly said, soothingly. “But it’s just a few more hours.”

  They decided to stick together. More eyes, more guns. Sierra said, “Can I bow out?”

  “Really?” Wes said.

  “Yeah. I’d like to go back and check on Dev, sit with him. Tell the men in jail we’re making progress and they’ll be out soon.”

  Kelly said, “You’re sure that’s what you want?”

  “I’m sure.”

  The woman who had been tending Jackson walked up.

  Wes said, “How is he?”

  “He’ll make it.”

  Sierra was relieved to hear it. Roy had saved Jackson by pulling him out of the fighting. And look at the reward he’d gotten for it.

  The woman said, “I want him carried inside on a board or sofa, and I want better light.”

  Kelly said, “There are lanterns inside, in several of the apartments.”

  “Can I go back to the jail now?” Sierra asked Kelly.

  “Yes, we have enough fighters. But are you okay?”

  “I’m tired,” is all Sierra said.

  “Then better you don’t risk getting hurt. And thank you for thinking of Dev. I’m sure he’ll be anxious for an update.”

  “Is there anything I should look for with him—medically, I mean?”

  “I think he’ll be okay. The hand, definitely. I took two stitches and butterflied it. It will heal, and I think he won’t lose any functionality. It’s his head that worries me. He was concussed by the blast, and I shouldn’t have let him come. But no, there’s nothing you or I can do about that.”

  Sierra dragged herself far enough out of her pit of worry to reassure Kelly. “He would have come if he ended up following us in your truck. You couldn’t have stopped him.”

  “Maybe not. My little boy is growing up.”

  “He’s grown,” Sierra said.

  “I guess you’re right.”

  Wes was arranging the others in squads of three, and Kelly hurried over to them.

  Sierra turned for the jail. She didn’t have her goggles, so if anyone came at her, she couldn’t see them. She hoped she didn’t encounter the enemy, for if she did, she’d be reluctant to shoot, fearing they were someone from the other neighborhood, cut off somehow from their main group.

  But she didn’t encounter anyone. She made it back to the jail without incident. Knocking the code on the door, she entered the lit interior of the jail. It was good to be in the light again. Good to not be shooting. She popped the magazine out of her rifle, pocketed it, cleared the chamber, and leaned her rifle in the corner, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t have to fire it again tonight.

  Or today, if it had passed midnight. She felt as if she’d been at it for days. But it might be no more than two or three hours.

  Chapter 16

  Sierra explained what had happened to Mr. Lambert and Dev. Mr. Lambert said, “I moved the second prisoner, the one Kelly brought over. He’s locked in an office.”

  “Was there trouble?” she asked.

  “No, I just thought it was best to keep them separated.”

  Sierra then took the keys and went back to explain their status to the men still locked up.

  “So you can let us out!” one man shouted, before she had hardly begun. Several others echoed him.

  “Soon after dawn,” she said.

  More shouting, complaining, and pleading greeted that. She waited it out, looking down at the hogtied invader, who was looking terrified. As well he should. She tapped him with the toe of her boot. “You, come with me.”

  “You’ll have to cut me loose,” he said.

  “I’ll need my rifle again, I suppose,” she said with a sigh. She should have grabbed a spare handgun. They’d left enough sitting there in the apartments, and there was plenty of ammo next door at the duplex.

  Back at the front of the jail, Mr. Lambert was talking to Dev.

  She cleared her throat. “I’d like to move the other prisoner back there to somewhere secure—a room we can tie him up in and lock.”

  “Why?”

  “We can’t leave him there when we open the jail cell doors. He’ll be dead in thirty seconds.”

  “I’m not sure, but that’s the right thing to do,” Mr. Lambert said, but he frowned as he said it.

  “Your choice. You want to exile him, or put him on trial, or hang him in the Walmart parking lot, it’s none of my business. But he’s given us information so far, and if there’s more we need to know, it seems to me that it’s smart to keep him alive a day or so longer. If it’s two or three days, maybe you’ll all have gained some perspective. Calmed down. Decide on a trial.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Mr. Lambert said.

  “Your choice, like I say. But I’d like him out of there anyway. He heard everything I told the men. No reason to tell him what’s been going on, is there? Keep him in the dark. Literally and figuratively.”

  That seemed to convince Lambert to help her. She held the rifle on the prisoner while Mr. Lambert dragged him through the hall.

  “Wait,” the man said.

  “What?” Sierra had little patience with him, and her tone showed it.

  “I need to take a piss,” he said.

  Lambert looked at her and she shrugged. “If you can do it without needing your hands.”

  “I’m a man.”

  “Yeah, I notice how you all were men when I saw one of you raping a little girl,” Sierra said. It felt good to stir up that anger again, instead of only being angry at herself.

  “I never did that.”

  “You all seem the same to me. But sure, drag him into the bathroom and we’ll get him on his feet.”

  The man protested not having his hands free, but Sierra didn’t care if he wet his pants or not. Lambert had to undo his pants and fish out his penis, and he ended up sitting down like a woman. “Do you have to watch?” he said.

  “I’ve seen men pee before,” she said, but she hadn’t, not really. Only from the back. Certainly not like this.

  It was awkward, and both the prisoner and Mr. Lambert complained at each other, but it was accomplished. Mr. Lambert scrubbed his hands long enough he could have been preparing for surgery. They took him into the kitchen where there was plenty of sturdy metal equipment, and they tied him to the leg of an industrial sink with another flex cuff.

  Once that was done, she went back into the holding area. The men had calmed down.

  “Two of you have died,” she said.

  That quieted them completely. F
inally a voice said, “Who?”

  “Noah and Roy. I don’t know their last names. I’m sorry.” Her voice caught on the word. Sorry, for all the good that did.

  “Decent men,” said someone, and a murmur of agreement followed that.

  A man called out, “How many of them are dead?”

  “I don’t have an exact count. A few dozen, for sure. We’re getting on top of the situation. We have two bands of neighbors—my neighborhood and another—and six of your men out there. They’re hunting down the last of the invaders. And before you ask to help,” she said, not pausing at all to let them start shouting again, “we’re trying to keep you safe by keeping you here for now. Any strange man on the street can still get shot. Once your liberators have rooted out the last of them, you’ll be free to go home to your families.”

  “And then what?” a sad voice said.

  “You can start rebuilding. There are gardens in town. Some of you can hunt. You’ll be fed.”

  “It will never be the same,” the sad one said.

  “No,” she said. “No, it won’t. It isn’t for us, either. We think Payson has only a quarter to a third of the population it once did. There isn’t electricity, unless there’s some working to pump water through town. Gasoline is gone. You’ll have roofs over your head, and you have cold water from your taps. So it’s not the life you lived a year ago, but it’s a life. That’s more than a lot of people got.”

  “Like Noah and Roy,” someone said.

  “And countless others,” another man said. “I watched my brother die.”

  “What did you do with that guy?” asked another. “The one who was out here.”

  “We put him somewhere safe for now. It’s up to you, the town, what to do with him later.”

  “Kill them all,” said an angry voice.

  “Fine by me,” Sierra said, having to raise her voice to be heard over the cross-talk. “Or you can re-establish courts and police. I don’t care which. It’s your town.”

  “You aren’t going to set yourselves up as the new overlords then?”

  “No,” she said. “We have no interest at all in that.”

  “Then why did you do this? Risk yourselves?”

  “Two reasons,” she said, taking a moment to decide if it was okay to be honest. She decided it was. “We were getting the first forays by them. They came and attacked us. We wanted that to stop. But also, it was the right thing to do. This is your town, not theirs. The food your families are growing should feed you, not them. That’s it. That simple.”

  “And you won’t want to be compensated?” said the suspicious one.

  “We’re willing to trade some in the future, if we can find things to trade.”

  “Like what?” a man said.

  “Seeds, knowledge, skills. We have a guy who knows something about trapping small game, and maybe you don’t. That sort of thing.”

  “I know that,” said a new voice. “I trapped mink and beaver up in Michigan.”

  “Or whatever,” she said. “We don’t want to be enemies. We want to be friends. If that means leaving each other alone, that’s an okay way to be friends. But we have a true Payson friend now in Joan Kershaw, and I’d hate to lose her.”

  “That’s the Episcopal priest,” said a new voice.

  “Right. She and her girls are living with us. And some of us were friends with some of you before. I went to high school here. Anyway. I need to go look in on my friend. I’m sorry you have to stay here another couple hours, but it’s really for your own safety.”

  “I can’t wait to get a shower,” said another voice.

  “I’ll update you when I know more,” Sierra said, and she retreated back through the locked door that separated the holding cells from the administrative offices. She rejoined Dev, sliding down the wall to sit heavily across from him.

  “You look tired.”

  “I am. Tired in all kinds of ways.” Her mind drifted back to shooting Roy. So stupid. Careless. A spark of anger broke through the guilt and despair. Why hadn’t he answered the signal?

  Well, he hadn’t. And that was that. She’d live those moments over again if she could, make different choices, but she couldn’t. What had been done was done, and now she was stuck with the consequences.

  “What are you thinking of?”

  “Nothing. The battle at the apartments.”

  “Did it go well?”

  “We only took two casualties that I know of. Jackson was shot. And the invaders are all dead except one, and he’s bleeding and might die before anyone gets back to him.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t sound enthusiastic.”

  “Tired, like I said. How about you? I came here to keep you company. Is your head better? Your hand hurting a lot?”

  “The hand is throbbing, but it isn’t what I’d call pain. And if I stay still, my head feels better. If I move it at all, that’s when it starts to hurt more.”

  “Maybe you should be lying down.”

  “Hurts worse if I lie flat. Hurts worse if I move. Hurts to talk and to listen.”

  “We don’t have to talk. We can just sit here, be quiet.” Take some comfort in being friends. But then she remembered his declaration of love. Maybe her presence wasn’t a comfort for him. She tried to stop thinking of herself and her roiled up feelings about shooting Roy and start thinking of Dev. “You did a great job tonight. And your mom is just fine. You don’t need to answer if it hurts to talk. And I’ll shut up now.”

  And she did. He sat there, his eyes closed, his breathing growing more regular.

  Now that it was quiet, and she had nothing to distract her, her mind went back to Roy’s death. The shadowed figure of a man dragging another man. Her signals. Only silence in return. His back in the crosshairs. How she’d felt—satisfied—when she hit him. Over and over, it replayed in her mind. Not the moment when she knew she’d hit one of her own. Just the act, right up to that irrevocable moment.

  Up to the murder.

  No. It was an accident.

  Was it? An accident would be forgetting to put the safety back on and a discharge hitting someone. But she wanted to shoot. Felt good about hitting her target. Pleased with herself. Proud.

  She sat there, obsessing about the moment, listening to Dev’s breathing while he dozed, until she could stand it no longer. She grabbed her cell phone for the light, went past Mr. Lambert and said, “I’m going into the kitchen.” She had a vague idea of doing some menial kitchen task, bagging vegetable trimmings for compost, or doing an inventory of equipment. Anything to keep her mind off the cycle of thoughts before they drove her completely insane.

  She had forgotten the prisoner. There he sat, attached to the sink. Sierra was about ready to turn and go when she changed her mind.

  The place smelled of raw celery. There was no sound at all except the rustle of her clothes as she squatted in front of the man.

  “Do you ever worry about what you’ve done?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You killed people in Payson, right? Raped? Stole?”

  “I never raped. I had one of the girls who offered twice, up until Franco claimed her. But I never raped.”

  “Just killed and stole.” It felt good to accuse him, good to know she wasn’t the only bad person in the world.

  “We were surviving. Same as you.”

  Maybe he wasn’t wrong about that. “Why Payson?”

  “It was just where we went. We had to get higher. It could have been Prescott, I guess. The valley is so fuckin’ hot now. When the food ran out at the stores, we were able to acquire some elsewhere. But when the electricity stopped, we had to move or we’d have died of the heat.”

  “So you formed a gang in Phoenix? Were these all guys you knew before?”

  “Some of us. Some of us went to the same high school. But others joined that core group. Friends, cousins, like that.”

  “How old are you
?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  He’d seemed older.

  “Had you ever killed a man before oil ran out?”

  “No. I mean, I hadn’t even been in a push fight since sixth grade.”

  “Crazy world we’re living in,” she said.

  “It is. You understand. You won’t let them kill me, will you?”

  “It’s not mine to decide. It’s the people that you’ve wronged.”

  “Then I’m dead.”

  Sierra suspected he was right. She’d never be able to atone for shooting Roy, but she wouldn’t root for this one to die any longer. She sighed. “I tell you what. I’ll remind them you gave us the location of the hideout, the extra ammo, and that you cooperated, and I think you should be exiled instead—driven somewhere in a car and let out to fend for yourself.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “You won’t regret it. I promise you.”

  “I’m not sure it might not be better to be executed,” she said. “It’s a new world out there. People who have survived? We’ve learned to defend ourselves. One man, alone, no weapon? I’m not sure you’d last long.”

  “But I’d have a chance.”

  “More than you gave some of them.”

  He looked away, unable to deny the truth of what she said. Feeling remorse? Or shame? Or just sorry for himself about being caught?

  It didn’t matter to her which he was feeling. She stood.

  Or maybe it did matter. One last question.

  She asked him, “You ever think about the people you’ve killed? Like in bed at night. Trying to sleep. Their faces flash through your mind? Tell me the truth. It still won’t change that I’ll put in a good word for you.”

  He shrugged, still not looking at her.

  What to make of that? He knew enough to feel ashamed of not feeling ashamed for the lives he’d taken. There might be a lesson there for her, but she was damned if she could figure it out.

  “I’ll tell them,” she said, and she did, going to Mr. Lambert and saying what she’d said she would. She wouldn’t repeat it a second time. She doubted it’d factor into the Paysonites’ decision. But she’d made a promise, and she fulfilled it.

  Lambert nodded. “I’ll mention it. But I don’t think it will sway opinion. I doubt any of these men will be left alive beyond tomorrow.”