EMP: Return of the Wild West Box Set | Books 1-3

by Hamilton, Grace

  She left it at that, and he decided not to press the issue. If she wasn’t ready to talk, she wasn’t ready to talk. So be it.

  They finally stepped out of the trees onto the ranch, and he saw the big eyesore fence surrounding the property. Though it was quite ugly, with mismatched wood and hastily aligned boards, it made him feel better to see the house and barn enclosed like that. He even had a couple of lookout platforms at strategic corners. Seeing this, Justine gasped.

  “Who built all of this?” she asked. “There’s so much more of it now.”

  “We all did,” Darryl replied. “Well, I did quite a bit of it by myself.”

  Justine made a soft whistling sound. “I guess you’ve never built a fence before.”

  He decided not to let the comment hurt his feelings. “Actually, no, this was my first fence, and I was working kind of fast.”

  “Doesn’t really matter what it looks like, I suppose,” she added. “Just as long as it keeps the bad people out.”

  “Exactly.”

  He’d built a large gate across the driveway, reinforcing the hinges so it couldn’t easily be forced open. As he pushed the wheelbarrow through, he pulled it shut behind him and set the crude wooden brace in place to hold it shut. Tabitha was on the porch repairing a small wicker chair as they approached, and she rose to meet them.

  “Justine Carmichael,” she said. “You poor thing. I’m so glad you’re alive.”

  And then, to Darryl’s surprise, his grandmother rushed down the porch steps and crushed Justine in a big, motherly embrace. Justine melted and sobbed against her shoulder. Darryl stood beside them awkwardly for a few seconds, then made his way to the porch and sat down on the edge, placing the rifle beside him.

  After a moment, his mother appeared, stepping outside with a big jug of tea. She set the tea and some cups on a nearby table. By then, Justine had pulled away from Tabitha, wiping her eyes furiously on the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

  “Come, dear, have a seat,” Tabitha said, ushering her onto the porch. “You look like you’ve been through hell.”

  “Have a nice cup of tea,” Marion added, pouring the first glass and handing it to Justine. “It always makes me feel better.”

  “Thanks,” Justine said, holding the cup with both hands as she sat down, cross-legged, beside Darryl.

  She took a long drink of her tea, coughed, wiped her mouth on her sleeve, then took another. Darryl felt a sudden urge to put an arm around her, to offer some kind of comfort, but it was just a bit too much. Instead, he just sat there staring off across the yard.

  “Justine, dear, what happened?” Tabitha asked, speaking softly. For a crusty old rancher, she could sound really gentle and comforting when she wanted to. “I know it’s not easy to talk about, but there are things we need to know.”

  “Well…” Justine took another sip, then set the half-empty cup on the porch between her and Darryl. “Mom and Dad had been fighting for days about her job. Before the event, she managed a warehouse in town. Actually, I think it’s a grocery distribution center for stores in the area.”

  “I know the place,” Marion said. “I’ve seen the delivery truck at the gas station.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” Justine said. “Anyway, after we lost power, Dad wanted her to basically loot the warehouse. I mean, she used to bring home a bunch of stuff from the warehouse anyway, like food that was out of date or packages that broke open. Maybe more than that. Heck, they used to sell it to neighbors. But now Dad wanted all of it. He said it would either go to waste or get stolen by others, but even with everything going on, Mom didn’t want to steal from her place of work. She said, ‘It still belongs to the company.’”

  She looked back at Tabitha and said, as if she thought the situation needed clarification, “My mom was the breadwinner of our family. Dad’s been on disability for years, even though I always thought he could probably work. Anyway, he thought since the company wasn’t paying Mom that she should basically take her pay out of the warehouse in terms of goods—all of the food and drinks, basically.”

  “I’m sure Mayor Filmore has had his eye on that place from day one,” Tabitha said.

  “Probably,” Justine said. Just hearing Tabitha say the man’s name made her visibly wince. “Anyway, my little sister has anemia…I mean…had anemia. Most people outside the family don’t know that, but it was really bad, and it got worse after the power went out. Cold hands and feet, dizziness, and she was getting more and more pale. Mostly, I guess it was from malnutrition, but Dad finally convinced Mom to go to the warehouse to get beans, because they’re supposed to be good for the anemia. He gave her a big hiker’s backpack and told her to load it up, and she set off into town. I don’t even like baked beans. Ugh!”

  For a moment, Justine seemed to lose her train of thought, her gaze lifting into the blue sky. Then she shook her head, as if coming back to herself, and said, “She came back later with a ton of Heinz beans, like, more than any person would ever want to eat, but I guess word had gotten back to the mayor. One of the volunteer guards must have spotted her going into the warehouse, so the next morning, Filmore showed up at our house. At first, he was all friendly and professional, just making polite conversation, but then he asked about all the cans on the porch. He wanted to know where we got the food from, what we were doing with it, who we were bartering with, and when my parents refused to tell him, his mood changed fast. It’s like he pulled the mask off, you know?”

  Darryl recalled his own nighttime encounter with the mayor. Yes, he’d seen that sudden change himself, hadn’t he? However, as he recalled the encounter, he also thought of an offhand comment he’d made to Filmore about cutting deals with the Carmichaels. The mayor might have put two and two together—wrongly, of course—thinking that the Carmichaels were looting in town and bartering the food with other area residents.

  Did I inadvertently cause all of this? he wondered, feeling a stab of guilt. He bent over, gripping his head with his hands.

  “My parents insisted on playing dumb, even when he got angry,” Justine continued, “and finally the mayor stormed out of there. It was weird. I was upstairs through the whole thing; I heard the entire conversation through the heater vent. I didn’t know the mayor had such a sinister side to him.”

  “Leo Filmore has always been a vile little weasel of a man,” Tabitha said. “He’s a stain on the earth. We should have run him out of town years ago, but his time is coming. Believe me.”

  Justine glanced up at Darryl, knitting her eyebrows, clearly intrigued by Grandma’s comment. Darryl shrugged and nodded. Yeah, his time is coming.

  “Well, the mayor finally stormed out of our house, cussing up a storm, and after that, Dad and Mom decided we were going to leave the house and move into the warehouse,” Justine continued. “They thought it would be safer. It’s definitely more fire-resistant than our old house, and it’s got big, heavy door that bolts shut. They planned on making the move in the dead of night, so we spent the day getting ready for the move. I was sent out to gather some supplies in town, and I didn’t get back home until that afternoon. I knew something was wrong because the front door was wide open.”

  She picked up her tea, but then she just held it in her hands and stared at it. Her gaze became distant, as if she were seeing through the tea, through the ground, and right into the center of the earth. Nobody prodded her to speak, so the quiet stretched on for almost a full minute. Darryl even looked at his grandma at one point, wondering if she was going to do anything, but she was seated on the rocking chair, calmly waiting.

  “I could see through the porch window that he had my whole family on the couch, and he was holding them at gunpoint,” Justine said. “That cop from town was there, too. I don’t know her name. She’s always riding that stupid horse up and down the road. Anyway, I ducked down beneath the porch and watched as my mom handed him the big ring of keys for the warehouse. ‘Just take it and go,’ she said. ‘You’ve got what you want. Take it and go!�
�� But then she screamed. I think he pointed the gun at her. Maybe she tried to run away, but then…”

  She took a drink, but held it in her mouth a second before swallowing.

  “Then he just shot her. Just like that. It was so loud, and it kind of flashed through the window a few times. Dad jumped up from the couch and tried to rush him, but that lady cop shot him, too, and then my sister, Sadie, screamed and ran upstairs. Filmore followed her, and then I heard more shots. They fired their guns so many times. So many times.” Her voice trailed off into a whisper, and she wiped away tears. “When I heard them coming back down the stairs, I ran away. I went into the woods and just fled and cried, and my heart felt like it was going to break through my ribs, and finally, I collapsed out there in the middle of nowhere, and that’s where I was until today.”

  Darryl’s guilt had welled up inside of him until he could barely breathe. Why had he ever thought to make a deal with that slimy mayor? How stupid. How absolutely stupid. Finally, he couldn’t sit still, so he rose and walked to the far corner of the porch, leaning against the handrail.

  “Justine, thank you for sharing all of that,” Marion said. “I know it wasn’t easy to talk about, but we needed to know. The mayor’s not going to get away with what he’s done.”

  “You can’t do anything to him,” she said. “He’s surrounded by armed people now. He’s become like a little tyrant king there in the town hall.”

  “He’s not invulnerable,” Marion said, “and he’s going to pay for what he’s done.”

  Tabitha spoke then, sudden and rather loud. “Darryl, what is it you’re hiding?”

  Shocked by her words, he spun around to find that she had shifted her chair in his direction. Her look was both curious and severe. What had she read in his expression? How had he given himself away?

  “What do you mean, Grandma?” he replied.

  “I know Justine’s story was disturbing,” she said, “but you look guilty. What are you hiding? I think you’d better tell us everything. And I do mean everything.”

  All eyes were on him now, and he glanced from Justine to his mother to his grandmother, then straight down at the gray floorboards beneath his feet.

  “Is it about the mayor?” Tabitha asked. “Did you know something about what he planned to do?”

  “No, I had no idea he would ever hurt anybody like that,” Darryl said, “but…well, actually, yes, it’s about the mayor.”

  I’m not getting out of this one, he thought, and even if I did, this guilt is too much. Just get it over with. Tell them and take the consequences, stupid.

  “Okay,” he said, working himself up to it. “Okay, here’s the truth.” He couldn’t look at his family, didn’t even want them in his peripheral vision, so he stared off in the direction of the barn. “Remember those two cows that disappeared? Well, they weren’t dragged off by wild animals. I gave them to Mayor Filmore in exchange for a few months’ worth of diabetes medicine.” He heard all three of the women behind him gasp, and it made an almost harmonic sound, but it also made his whole body clench.

  He plunged on. “Well, we had more cows than we could take care of, and Grandma will need that medication eventually, and we can’t afford to let her get sick, so I did what I thought was best. Only, the mayor kind of screwed me over and didn’t give me as much medicine as he promised, and then he also threatened me, but…” He trailed off. He hadn’t even gotten to the worst of it yet, but he needed a moment to gather his courage.

  In the silence, he heard his grandmother’s breathing, fast and angry little breaths, but it was his mother who spoke first.

  “I’m shocked,” she said. “I can’t believe you would do business with that snake and not even talk to us first.”

  Tabitha shushed her. “What else, Darryl? You were going to admit something else, weren’t you?”

  “The thing is…I might have mentioned in passing that the Carmichaels were cutting deals with people,” he said. “I might have said something about trading with us for curing salt. It just sort of came up in conversation, and now I’m afraid I turned the mayor’s attention in their direction, so…” He trailed off again, unsure how to end his confession. In the silence that followed, he felt about as low as he’d ever felt. Justine hadn’t responded. Indeed, he couldn’t see her, so he had no idea how she’d taken the news, but he didn’t dare look at her. If he saw blame in those brown eyes, he would never recover.

  “Your decision to make a deal with the mayor was incredibly stupid,” his grandmother said, in a low voice that could have cut paper. “I thought you had enough sense to see what kind of man he is when we interacted with him at the town meeting. The fact that you might have also turned his attention to the Carmichaels just makes this whole thing even more idiotic. On top of that, you risked your own life dealing with that man. I’m very disappointed.”

  Those were the words that finally pierced all the way through, and he bowed his head in shame. He heard his grandmother rise from her seat, heard her footsteps getting closer, and he tensed himself for some kind of blow. Instead, he felt her arms sliding around his shoulders as she hugged him.

  “You were trying to help me,” she said. “I get it. If you’d done this for personal gain, I’d have real reason to be mad. I appreciate you thinking about me and wanting to help, but you should have come to us first. We would have talked about it as a family and come to a joint decision. And we would have found another way than dealing with him.”

  “I was just trying to take care of things,” he said, “to take some initiative, but I won’t do it again. We’ll talk about it together from now on.”

  His mother approached and hugged him as well, but Darryl looked past her shoulder to Justine. The girl was leaning against the support post for the porch, staring off toward the gate, her hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt. He couldn’t tell how she felt about what he’d said because her face was mostly in shadow.

  She hates me, he thought, and I don’t blame her.

  “Well,” Tabitha said, stooping down to pick up the rifle. “What’s done is done. Mayor Filmore needs to be stopped, and we’re going to stop him. Today.”

  “Today?” Darryl said, almost choking on the word.

  “That’s right,” Tabitha replied.

  Justine blew her breath out loudly then. “You didn’t cause it, Darryl,” she said. “Ironically, it was all of those cans of beans on the porch that caused it. Can you imagine that? A bunch of Heinz beans got my whole family killed, because that mayor is an evil, greedy piece of garbage.” She turned and looked at him. He had expected to see tears in her eyes, but she was scowling darkly, her upper lip drawn back. “I want him to pay. I want to help make him pay. Let’s kill that snake.”

  32

  They didn’t like Tabitha’s plan, and they didn’t have to like it. Tabitha knew there was no way a frontal assault on the town hall would work. Four people would never make it past all of the guards and police to get to the mayor’s office. Anyway, the risk was too great. Tabitha wasn’t about to put Darryl and Marion in such danger.

  Of the three, I’m the most expendable, she thought. Of course, she didn’t say this to them. It would have just made them resist all the harder, so instead, she’d just done it.

  “I’m going into town,” she said, “by myself. That’s all there is to it. If I’m not back in a couple of hours, assume the worst.”

  And then she’d walked away, as Darryl, Marion, and the Carmichael girl gaped at her from the porch. Tabitha didn’t bother taking the gun with her. It would only have added to the tension. Plus, if she got into a violent confrontation in town, she wasn’t going to shoot her way out of there, not with so many guards and cops. Instead, she took a nice, big slab of ribs, wrapped it in butcher paper, and stuffed it into a backpack.

  She hoped the mayor’s greed would lower his defenses, and during her walk into town, she worked through the conversation in her mind. It was actually a rather nice walk. She used the dirt ro
ad, and everything was green and quiet. It was chilly today, but not unbearable. A thin coat was enough.

  Keep your anger in check, she told herself. You’re pretending to be friends now.

  Easier said than done. Her anger toward the slimy old mayor was like a bottomless well of bile. All of her worries about Tuck and Greg, her frustrations at keeping the ranch going, and her rage about the killing of the Carmichaels was directed at one man now. One awful man, but she couldn’t let it show.

  As she approached the edge of town, she heard the clop of hooves. A moment later, the police officer with the short black hair, the woman named Pam Grasier, appeared, riding her horse down the road. She had a shotgun in the crook of her right arm, a wide-brimmed hat pulled so low her eyes were hidden. When she spotted Tabitha, she drew up short, turning the horse to block her.

  “Tabitha Healy,” she said. “Are you headed into town?”

  Ask the obvious, why don’t you, stupid? Tabitha thought, but she managed to fix a pleasant expression on her face.

  “I’m here to barter with the mayor,” Tabitha replied. “I’ve got a deal that he’s going to want to know about. Could be good for the town. I know we’re not best buddies or anything, but there’s no reason we can’t do business together, Leo and me.”

  Pam stared hard at her for a few seconds. Finally, she motioned with her hand and turned the horse toward town.

  “Okay, fine,” she said. “Follow me. I’ll escort you to his office.”

  Tabitha moved alongside the horse as they went the rest of the way into town. When she got there, she saw a few people moving through town, all of them armed. Of those armed people, two broke away and approached her, falling in line behind the police horse as they escorted her the rest of the way.

  When they reached the town hall, she noted that the windows and front door had been reinforced with metal bars. Were they expecting an invasion?