The vagueness of the daylight outside his tent seeped into his consciousness and eventually the sounds of the encampment filtered through as well. Not so much listening as absorbing the bucolic soundtrack, it was only thirst that forced his hand to face the torture of trying to move.
He’d lain on the worst of his injured shoulders. Now it was swollen beyond its normal size, bruised and tender in such a way it was hard to believe the meat of his shoulder hadn’t somehow split amid all the trauma. Tom rocked himself forward, swallowing the ongoing gasp as he felt clammy lips almost not wanting to part. He focused his left hand to collect the water bottle, almost unable to move his other arm, right hand questing weakly from its wrist. He put the canteen towards it, grunting as he forced through the painful act of unscrewing the cap with his nearly immobilized hand. He drew a half-dozen steadying breaths and managed the canteen to his split mouth and drank deeply, paused in the same awkward position for a few more breaths, than drank it dry.
The tent flap flared and Tom almost fell as the sunlight strobed him like a laser. The collage of black and white left no sense of the newcomer until he heard Freestone’s voice.
“Can you stand?”
“I don’t know.”
Freestone shucked his jacket back to let his hand rest on the big holstered automatic. Tom only looked up at him, a picture of misery no doubt, but those steadying breaths put him in good stead to muster what lifeforce he could to meet the other man’s hard eyes. There was nothing to be gained here appealing to sympathy. That lesson, if nothing else, he’d already learned.
“I don’t know why you haven’t just shot me already,” Tom croaked.
“Waste of good ammo.”
Freestone bared his teeth in a chimpanzee’s smile, something savage about it. Tom dropped his eyes only through exhaustion, barely able to hold his head up for the sake of the exchange. Nonetheless, he doubted it was just for dramatic tension that Freestone looked ready to drop him if he really was just another wounded animal ready to be put down.
“I’ve got this,” Tom said.
He braced his left hand on the canvas floor and went to stand and royally fucked it up.
“Don’t got this,” Freestone chortled mirthlessly and did nothing to help.
Tom tried to move his right arm around for support and immediately regretted it. Pain like nothing he’d ever experienced went through him in a lightning strike and he gasped and then totally collapsed. He lay there under Freestone’s watchful, oddly patient stare, then rolled over onto his left side and got one knee under himself and willed himself into levitation and rose shakily to both feet. He stood there, hunched, breathing like a madman, an ape about to face the jungle, the chieftain’s silent eyes on him.
“Is there a reason I shouldn’t let my boys lynch you, Vanicek?”
Tom focused on not passing out, then straightened, forcing his eyes again towards the other man.
“You’d be within rights,” he answered.
“I expected some kind of argument.”
Tom nodded.
“I know,” he said. “There’s not many excuses for what happened. I meant it . . . when I said I was sorry. And that wasn’t just a . . . throwaway line.”
Freestone waited for more.
“How many men did you lose?”
But the Confederates’ boss ignored the question. There wasn’t much inside the tent to distract him, but Freestone managed a thoughtful scan around all the same.
“What the hell were your people doing?” he asked.
“The people with me. . . .”
Tom sighed, moroseness failing to keep the fear of death at bay, but it played well, Freestone with a front-row seat for Tom’s contrition.
“From the City,” Freestone prompted.
“Yeah,” Tom said. “I wasn’t even meant to be on that . . . mission.”
“Mission, huh?”
Tom didn’t know where to start, and it was a rare occasion when it seemed he didn’t know what to say, but throwing his dead comrades under the bus was almost as distasteful as letting the cowboys hang him like they wanted.
“Buster, you got to explain yourself,” Freestone said at last. “My people aren’t animals, but they deserve answers. There’s eight men dead and a few more in a bad way. They didn’t deserve this, and your people shot first.”
“I know.”
“Then why the fuck’d you do it?”
Now Freestone flashed his anger. One gnarled hand the color of deadwood closed in a fist that’d done some damage in its time. Tom tried to clear the intruding fog from his thoughts.
“Your people’ve been hitting travelers headed for Columbus,” Tom said. “I thought we were doing some recon . . . but I’ve got my own doubts about that now.”
“No shit.”
“A city means people, and people mean . . . I don’t know what you’d call it.”
“Take a stab.”
“People means politics.”
“If you’re telling me my boys died because of politics, I’ll hang you myself.”
“I was there because of MacLaren,” Tom said. “My friend, Dan. He’s dead now. All of them are dead, apart from Pamela. Dan’s the reason I . . . shot one of your men.”
“He the only one you killed?”
“Do you still have my bow?”
“Yep,” Freestone replied. “Answer the fucking question.”
“You see arrows in anyone else?”
“So you’re just an innocent guy caught up in a deal gone bad?”
“No one’s innocent,” Tom hissed faster and more sincerely than he’d intended. “Not you, and not me. But I never came here expecting what happened. I thought we needed intel.”
“Confederates ain’t the only ones roaming these parts,” Freestone said. “We’ve lightened the load for more’n a few of your pilgrims, sure. But like I said, my people aren’t animals. We don’t roll that way, and I don’t let ‘em. That’s no way to live.”
“So you’re gentleman highwaymen?”
“I’m not the one beggin’ for my life here.”
“Neither am I.”
“Yeah,” Freestone said. “I was wonderin’ about that.”
“If you want me dead, that’s your call,” Tom said and let out a long defeated sigh he only half believed in. “Not saying I’m happy about it. Pamela was right. I have kids, in the City. They don’t even know where I am.”
“They will, if ol’ Pammy makes it back to Columbus alive.”
Tom sniffed. He didn’t like the amusement in Freestone’s eyes.
The Confederate nodded, lifted the tent flap, and motioned for Tom to follow outside.
*
MOST OF THE day was gone. There was a sense of summer sliding away into the fall already, horses at play in a staked-out field towards the sunlit horizon throwing dancing shadows across the half-dozen circled wagons and more than twenty tents making up Freestone’s camp. With the night coming on, the place was a hive of activity. Tom couldn’t take it all in, the pain in his shoulders and ribs competing with concerns for his bruised and battered limbs, the skin off all his knuckles, his precious jacket long gone, shirt torn and jeans caked with mud and blood and whatever grime they’d dragged him through to bring him here – and to what purpose, he still didn’t know.
It felt too early to think he might still survive, though Freestone walked by his side keeping to Tom’s pained, shuffling pace more like a tour guide than someone ready to put a bullet in him. A few of the teenagers seen earlier moved past carrying bundles of sticks and dead grass, heading into the cleared center of the encampment and what looked like the makings of a bonfire. The smell of hot stew rolled through the scene, a collective camp kitchen with a dozen women working a pair of long outdoor trestle tables off to the right. The lowing of a solitary cow drew Tom’s attention to more than a dozen of them tethered together, not too far from the remaining horses getting groomed and prepped for bedding down for the night. A pair of lit
tle girls ran giddily between the animals, happily in their element, though more than a few of the passing adults shot Tom dark, unforgiving looks that chilled whatever warmth the otherwise domestic scenes offered. He gingerly felt his shoulder with his left hand, which was the only semi-functional limb at his disposal for now. As he winced, the realities – and the complexities – of such injuries sent already glum thoughts into a new downward spin.
“Hurting much?” Freestone asked.
“What do you think?”
“Yeah, looks like you could use a doctor.”
Freestone gave another of his characteristic unsympathetic laughs.
“You’re shit out of luck there,” he said.
The same cow made another depressing call and Freestone’s expression crinkled with unwitting annoyance, casting his eyes across his domain to see all was well. He nodded to Teller and Wolski as they passed, something of the married couple about the two hard men. Teller met Tom’s eyes with a murderous look.
“Grub’s up in twenty,” Wolski said.
Tom tried gesturing towards the cattle.
“You have cows,” Tom said slowly. “Real cowboys, huh?”
They started walking again at Freestone’s encouragement, away from the women fussing at their labors, little girls and a few toddler boys at their feet peeling turnips and yams, a strong-featured woman in a bloody apron cleaning up after the grisly task of making dinner and maybe explaining the nearby cattle’s mild distress, several sides of beef hanging from hooks alongside the covered wagons. The woman with the goshawk, unencumbered now, moved chattily among the women without taking part, blue eyes flicking Tom’s way and for some reason earning him a sympathetic smile. If she thought to start towards them, thirty yards or so away, one quick headshake from Freestone discouraged her, and the woman bustled away clicking fingers for a couple of the children to follow her on an unrelated task.
There were at least thirty youngsters in the camp all told, and a half-dozen men idled around the camp’s periphery on watch, rifles at ease as they scanned the wide open country for any incoming threats. The outdoor kitchen threw up smoke enough to alert anyone in the neighborhood, and though he wasn’t much of a woodsman despite the years hunting, Tom guessed the trampled ground only got that way fairly recently, the Confederates a small army on the move, maybe fifty men and a few less women plus their children in the total.
“There’s plenty of cattle out there,” Freestone said eventually. “The Dead Ones know not to mess with a herd of cows, though I’ve seen ‘em take to a hog like tryin’ to make a fat lady sing. Left to their own, cows and horses, you know, they’re loose across the countryside between here and Illinois.”
Tom had a flash-in-the-pan thought about Anna Novak, though it’d been years now.
“You roam that far?” he asked.
“Hell, we wintered in Missouri last year,” Freestone said without looking at him, a little like Tom, eyes always on the play of actors around the campsite.
“You brought these people together?”
Freestone’s crinkled gaze finally fell back on Tom.
“You like it in the City?” he asked instead.
“I’m not sure,” Tom said as honestly as he could.
“Then why do it?” Freestone asked. “If you weren’t a murderer, a man like you’d do well with us.”
“Is that what I am?” Tom replied. “A murderer?”
Freestone said nothing, holding that long look, and for some reason Tom dropped his eyes.
“The City’s for my children,” he said at last. “As you can see, I clearly don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”
Freestone sniggered at that.
“You a vegan, Vanicek?”
“No.”
“Good,” Freestone said, straight-faced, as if he expected anything else. “Grub’s up. Let’s get some protein into you.”
He motioned to lead the way, and Tom tried not to let the pain show in his face or his walk as he shuffled towards the bonfire like an eighty-year-old, just glad that death wasn’t coming for him right that minute. One of Freestone’s men set matches to the kindling and the younger boys with him added sticks and pieces of grass, delighting in the play of fire as it arose before them, the primeval magic of the act restored just like in ancient times.
*
IT WASN’T EASY sitting on the hard ground, and once he was there, for a minute or two all Tom wanted to do was fall over on his least-painful side and let the night overtake him, but the gathering gloom wasn’t final yet, and there were too many people all around for him to do anything but stare back at them agog, avoiding the most hateful glares, conscious that several of the womenfolk were red-eyed and worn-out from fresh grief, supported by other women in the tight-knit community who shot nasty looks his way pretty much non-stop.
There was something tribal about the camp, the parked wagons causing Tom to think of early Europeans like the Huns and Vandals making their way across the continent from the Russian steppes, feeding off the land and adapting to life forever on the move. Whatever the City Council managed in Columbus, there wasn’t an electronic device nor an electric light in sight out here in the wastes. When night fell, the bonfire illuminated everything – the joyous, flickering firelight stretching out to the fringes of the encampment before night itself and her sentries took over to keep them safe in the open country.
Freestone ambled away from him for a while, a disavowal of sorts, and one of the men he recognized from the disastrous mission gone wrong walked across, nursing his misgivings as he carried Tom a metal dish overflowing with a rich meat-and-vegetable stew.
“Boss said you’re to have this,” the scowling man said.
Tom reached for the plate with a fork already sticking out of the delicious mess, and he might’ve said “thank you” if the nameless cowboy didn’t drop the offering a second earlier than expected and the whole thing fell into Tom’s lap.
“Oops.”
The Confederate walked away leaving Tom staring down at the stew plastering his crotch, torn between trying to clean himself up and the life-affirming hunger that sprang from nowhere like some twisted nocturnal instinct.
“Damn, Gary,” a woman’s voice carried over to him. “Here, let me help you with that.”
The woman seen earlier with the goshawk moved across with some kind of dish towel in her hands, kindness becalming plain but handsome features. Any thoughts she might be the scene’s love interest were dispelled by the white-gold wedding band she wore, just like most of the other women, clearly proud – and defined – by her marital status within the camp.
She knelt and offered him the rag.
“People have a right to be hating on you, but if Colin wanted you dead, you’d be covered in flies already,” she said. “I’m Rika.”
“Rika,” Tom said. “That short for Ulrika?”
“You’re meant to tell me your name first.”
Rika was heavily freckled, more an Irish complexion than anything reflected in her name, whatever its origins.
“Tom Vanicek,” he said and took a guess. “You’re Freestone’s woman?”
“No,” she replied. “I’m his wife.”
“Why hasn’t he killed me yet?” Tom asked her. “Plenty of people here’d like to see it happen.”
As if to make his point, Tom glanced across to where three out of the many gathering men stood in a huddle watching and clearly discussing him, the biggest of them stripped down to a clean t-shirt and palming his fists as they continued their private speculation. Teller and Wolski joined them.
“Freestone’s our leader,” Rika said. “Things don’t work here with an iron hand. People trust him to know what’s best. You’re from the City. Plenty of our people are curious too.”
Nearby, women spread out blankets, corralling the camp children into sitting in small groups with the meals they carried themselves, no table service here. Most sat good-naturedly chatting and joking among themselves, though there w
as a group of other children who kept glancing Tom’s way wide-eyed as it dawned on him they were probably orphans now, or at least without their fathers, thanks to MacLaren’s mission. Guilt like nothing previous flooded through him, and Tom hung his head a moment, sighing before bringing himself back into the moment. One of the boys wore his arm in a sling and there was a woman among them who moved with a ginger gait, something in her poise speaking to a different brand of ongoing pain she silently carried.
“There’s things the City could offer you,” Tom said.
The hesitation in his thoughts was obvious in his diction.
“Doctors, for instance.”
Rika tsked and stood from her unhelpful crouch now he’d wiped most of the stew off himself and into the dirt.
“You think I’ll put in a good word for you with my husband?” she asked. “I only came over because I’m a God-fearing woman and I believe in helping strangers – even a filthy murderer like you.”
“‘God fearing’?” Tom replied. “How do you manage that, after all this?”
The malevolence left Rika’s face as swiftly as it appeared and she favored him with a slight ironic laugh, an intelligence behind that soft façade he knew made her a prize among the other women.
“Haven’t you found plenty to fear in God’s wrath after his judgment, Mr Vanicek?”
Rika left him with the dirty cloth and a promise to fetch a fresh plate of stew.
*
IF THE CONFEDERATES were waiting for a hanging, no one showed it. Instead, the assembled camp – minus its sentries – fell into the business of eating with a vigor belying just how ordinary these bonfire-lit feasts had become. It was their way of life. Tom felt strangely jealous.
Not too fussy about such things, he picked at a few pieces of beef mostly undisturbed by falling into his lap, and then one of Rika’s subordinates delivered the promised dish and Tom sat there, eating quietly with his aching jaw for lack of better options, as isolated as if he were a captive from some strange country exiled by history and language and clearly off-limits despite being right in their midst. If Freestone ate, Tom didn’t see it. The Confederates’ leader moved purposefully around the camp talking with different groups until his perambulation brought him back into Tom’s vicinity.
After the Apocalypse Book 3 Resurgence: a zombie apocalypse political action thriller Page 2