“All of it?”
McQuarry stopped his inventory check and sneered at Dickie. “Sheesh. How is it you’re so damned fat and out of shape? I darned near lost twenty pounds. Your cousin Neil’s lost at least that. But you’re a greasy lard. How is that?”
The rest of Dickie’s face turned the color of his cheeks. He bit his lower lip and wiped the top one with the back of his hand. “I’m just sayin’, Trick, you told us we’d grab what we could and come back. This place isn’t goin’ nowheres.”
McQuarry sucked in a deep breath through his nose. If it weren’t for his lifelong friendship with Neil, Dickie would be lying next to the dead man on the ground outside the storage unit.
The kid, several years younger than the rest of the crew, was a drain on resources. He complained and he whimpered in his sleep.
McQuarry exhaled slowly and did his best not to snarl. He worried Dickie would piss himself if he barked at him. Plus they didn’t need to call more attention to themselves. Just because what was left of the police were busy with roadblocks and checkpoints, it didn’t mean they wouldn’t respond to a rifle shot. He forced a humorless smile. “Look, Dickie, I changed my mind. That’s my prerogative and all. ’K? We likely won’t be coming back here. We gotta hide that dead guy somewheres. It might as well be in the unit. Five minutes and we leave.”
Dickie’s brow twitched, like he didn’t understand. Or it was that he didn’t agree with McQuarry. Regardless, he nodded and turned to grab an armful of canned cream of mushroom soup.
Neil shuffled past McQuarry with large boxes of rice under his arms. He jutted his chin toward the shelf full of dried goods. “This guy musta been one of them preppers. He’s got all kinds of stuff we ain’t got at the house. This is gonna set us up for a few weeks at least.”
McQuarry nodded in agreement. “It was a good find, O. Nice work. The rest of the guys are gonna be super happy. It might keep them from complaining for once.”
Neil dropped the boxes into the truck bed and hustled back to the unit. From the shelf he took three boxes of Bisquick. “Gotta keep the guys happy.”
That was the smartest thing Neil had said in days. Back at the house, there were seven other people waiting for them. Three men and four women. The men were all brothers. They were tough dudes McQuarry figured would come in handy in a pinch. They also had their own ideas about things. More than once, there’d been vocal disagreements about how to live, acquire goods and amass fortunes from the less fortunate. McQuarry was in charge, but it was a tenuous position. He didn’t know how long he could hold the group together or how long the brothers would let him.
McQuarry moved around the shelves and plucked a pair of clip-mounted fishing rods from the wall. The lines were drawn tight against the poles, the barbed hooks tucked into the eyelets. The rigs were cheap, picked up at Walmart, Target, or from the discount rack at a sporting goods store. They’d work though. No doubt. Now he needed the tackle box.
“Take these,” he said to Dickie and held out the poles. “We can use them.”
Dickie took them silently, spun around and rushed them to the truck.
McQuarry scanned the shelves at eye level and squatted. With the butt of the rifle on the floor and its muzzle pointed skyward, he leaned on it for balance. The others were scurrying to and fro, loading up whatever they could carry.
McQuarry checked his watch, another find at the new house. It was a self-winding watch with a fancy foreign name. All he had to do was shake his wrist every now and then to make sure it had enough motion to keep time. “Three minutes,” he called out.
He looked up from his watch and found what he was searching for. To the far left of a lower shelf was a two-toned brown tackle box. It looked like it might have been a small toolbox. The latch on its face was freckled with rust and when he grabbed it, latent dust plumed around the box. He coughed and unlatched the box with his free hand.
The lid peeled back and two hinged trays accordioned open. They were filled with extra hooks of varying types, tiny lead cannon balls, red and white bubble floats and a collection of lures. McQuarry smiled and latched the box shut. He used the rifle to stand and grabbed the box by its handle. It rattled at his side as he moved back to the truck. He placed the box in the bed and lifted the tailgate, slamming it closed. He turned back toward the unit.
“Let’s go. Time’s up.”
Neil was standing on a bottom shelf, trying to free another box. It was beyond his grasp and he looked like he might fall. “We got a couple of minutes, don’t we?”
“Nope. We gotta move the body. C’mon, get down from there. The two of you best—”
Dickie swiped at the sweat-soaked hair matted to his forehead and shook the moisture from his fingers. “You’re not helping?”
McQuarry stepped closer to the road and checked for oncoming traffic. His back was to the truck, the unit and his underlings.
Neil climbed down from the shelf and moved to the dead man. He picked up the hat and put it on his head backward. After adjusting it, he reached down and grabbed an arm.
“Help me with him,” he said to Dickie. “He’s too heavy to pull by myself.”
McQuarry held the rifle with both hands and rubbed a thumb along the barrel. In the distance to his left was the dark shape of a car or squatty SUV. Behind him, he heard the rumble of the rolling door lowering and slamming against the concrete lip of the unit. He called over his shoulder, keeping focus on the approaching car, “Lock it.”
“Done,” said Neil. “Let’s go.”
McQuarry spun on a boot heel and walked back to the truck. He took the front passenger seat. Neil got behind the wheel and Dickie climbed into the back.
Neil rolled the truck to the road as a green and white sheriff’s patrol SUV passed them. The deputy in the passenger’s seat craned his neck to watch them and McQuarry offered a friendly wave. The rifle was on his lap.
“That was close,” said Neil, easing the truck onto the road and accelerating in the direction opposite the SUV. “Too close.”
“They’re going to find the blood,” said Dickie. “We didn’t clean up the blood.”
McQuarry looked out his window, watching the tangles of roadside palmetto blur as the truck reached its cruising speed. He heard Neil and Dickie talking to each other, but he wasn’t listening. His focus was on the task at hand.
There was only so much time before the chaos would settle and he’d lose his upper hand. By then, he needed to make sure he’d amassed enough people, weapons and supplies to fortify his position.
He vaguely paid attention to the green that crept onto the shoulder, reaching out for sunlight from the dense forest of palms and brush that crowded the narrow strip of land between the road and the intracoastal. He thought about his father and the last time he’d seen him.
McQuarry didn’t know his father. The man was in and out of his life as he was in and out of prison. They’d crossed paths once on the inside. For two weeks they’d been among the thirteen hundred men at the Marion Correctional Institution. The state prison held a mix of security classes.
Sitting on the dirt next to the baseball diamond, his father offered him a cigarette, which McQuarry declined.
“Things’ll kill you,” said McQuarry.
His father laughed, revealing the wide gap where his front teeth used to be. He stuck a smoke between his thin lips and let it hang there while he spoke from the corner of his mouth. “At least you got your momma’s sense of humor. Better than taking after her in the looks department.”
The elder McQuarry took a book of matches from his prison shirt pocket. He tore a match from the book and held it between his fingers.
McQuarry bristled. He loved his mother. She was there for him. It didn’t matter the things she’d had to do to keep a roof over their heads. This man, his father, didn’t have the right to talk about her, let alone criticize her generally accepted lack of beauty.
“She’s dead, you know.”
His fathe
r stopped short of lighting the match. His face, hardened and pocked with acne scars, soured. A hint of regret flashed in his eyes before it disappeared. “Sorry to hear that,” he said. “I didn’t know.”
McQuarry watched his father light the cigarette and suck in his cheeks. The man closed his eyes and held the smoke in his lungs before blowing it out through his nose in twin streams.
They sat in silence for several minutes. McQuarry didn’t know what to say to him. And clearly, his father didn’t either. Finally, the old man rubbed the top of his shaved, pitted head and flicked the ash from the shrinking butt. “I know I ain’t been there for you, Trick. That’s my bad. I wished I was. That’s the God’s honest truth. If I was, you wouldn’t be here. You’d be on the outside and doing good things.”
McQuarry’s father took another drag and smashed the butt into the dirt. He exhaled and looked at McQuarry. “You gotta do what? Another six?”
McQuarry shrugged. “Five months, twenty-two days.”
“What are you gonna do when you get out?”
McQuarry didn’t answer. He didn’t have one.
“I’m gonna give you some advice,” said the elder McQuarry. “Take it or leave it, up to you. But if I learned one thing in my life, it’s to take advantage of opportunities when they come up. Don’t wait. Don’t think about it. Act. It’s the pondering and the hesitating that screws the pooch, you know?”
McQuarry thought about his father’s advice. A man who was spending the rest of his life in prison was offering what he thought was wisdom. He listened.
“When I waited for an opportunity to come to me, or when I thought too long about the plusses and minuses, it never worked out. When I acted though…” He snapped his fingers. A toothless grin reappeared. “When I acted, McQuarry, lemme tell you it was like gold falling from the sky. ’Cause like I said, when you think too hard about the right and the wrong, the good and the bad, you end up in here.”
McQuarry laughed at his father. It was a condescending “I can’t believe you actually believe this crap” laugh. “Do you hear yourself, old man? You’re doing life. You ain’t never gettin’ out. You spent more time in than out. You got caught doin’ about everything a man can get caught doin’ short of killing someone and you think your advice is worth two cents?”
His father was a moron. Pure and simple. He lived by some half-baked credo scratched on a bathroom wall with a razor blade.
The elder McQuarry frowned. The crease at his brow deepened. Without saying anything, he got to his feet and walked away. McQuarry watched him, waiting for him to stop, look back, say something. The old man did none of those things. He marched with purpose toward one of the eighteen buildings on the prison campus.
A couple of days later his father was transferred from Ocala to the Calhoun work camp. McQuarry never saw his father again. A couple of years later, he learned a shiv cut his father’s sentence short. It was a fight over cigarettes. At least that’s what he’d heard.
Now he sat in the passenger’s seat, having just murdered a man, blankly staring out at the blur and replaying that last conversation over and again in his head. After all of that time and distance, Trick McQuarry actually took his father’s advice.
When the Scourge struck, people panicked. They scurried around mindlessly like ants out of a stomped mound. Law enforcement spread itself thin. Behavioral norms reset. McQuarry acted.
He didn’t wait. He didn’t think about it. He took what he wanted using instinct and guile. One hundred and fifty-four days later, while the world around him struggled to come to grips with a new reality, he was just getting started. Damned if the old man wasn’t so much of a fool after all.
CHAPTER 5
MARCH 11, 2033
SCOURGE +161 DAYS
COCOA BEACH, FLORIDA
Kandy Belman was frozen. Her body wouldn’t let her move. Remnant smoke mixed with the sea air, acrid despite its faint odor. It told her the land might not be any safer than the ocean. Her muscles tensed; her stomach tightened.
Phil smiled empathetically and reached for her. “It’s okay, Kandy. We’ll be okay. I promise.”
How could he promise they’d be okay? There was no possible way he could promise.
The boat bumped against the dock. She was the last one on board. Everyone was ashore now. Even Barry Miller, the boat’s owner and de facto captain, was on the dock. He and Mike Crenshaw were making sure the lines were properly secured to large metal cleats.
The Millers’ kids, Sally and Jimmy, stood hand in hand on the dock. They watched her with what she deduced was a mix of pity and condescension.
Finally, she extended her hand and stepped from the boat as it drifted from the dock. Phil helped her maintain her balance, pulling her up and away from the fiberglass boat on which they’d spent the last five months. Her legs felt like jelly and her equilibrium was off. She took two steps on the dock and into Phil’s arms.
“It’s weird,” he said. “Standing on solid ground is disconcerting, isn’t it.”
It was good to have his arms wrapped around her. Even if he’d lost weight and appeared too thin for her liking, he was a comfort. She pressed her hands into his back and squeezed, her voice somewhat muffled as she said into his chest, “I don’t like this. I think we should stay on the boat.”
Phil chuckled and the laugh reverberated through his body. “You made that clear. That’s why we stayed out there another week. If it were up to the rest of us, we’d have come ashore five days ago.”
“Hey,” Barry said, “you guys take as long as you need, but we’re going in the house. We need to see what’s what. It’s been too long.”
Barry’s patience wasn’t what it had once been. For three weeks he’d ached to come ashore. He was tired of the constant shore watch, awaiting the arrival of the next flotilla of would-be pirates. He constantly checked his watch, though time of day was irrelevant. But Barry looked at it, shook it on his wrist out of habit and mumbled the time.
The watch was the first Christmas gift his wife had given him. It was a Tag Heuer, not cheap and it wound with the movement of his wrist. He couldn’t part with it. And apparently he couldn’t part with the convention of checking the time.
His temper was quick and he’d become short with everyone—his wife, his children and especially with Mike Crenshaw. Mike had pushed to stay at sea. It wasn’t until Mike proposed going ashore that the majority went along with it.
Somehow Mike had become the leader on board the Rising Star. He’d gone from a quiet, self-effacing nerd afraid of his own shadow to a self-assured hero. More than once he’d risked himself for the benefit of the others on board. Self-sacrifice had a way of making someone a leader.
“Go ahead,” said Phil. “We’ll be there in a minute.”
Kandy pulled away from Phil’s embrace and watched the others move toward the Millers’ intracoastal home. Mechanized hurricane shutters covered the wall-sized, seamless glass panels, which provided a view of the water from inside the home’s beautifully appointed living room and kitchen.
She’d only been there once, in the hours before they set out to sea, but she held onto the images as some sort of grounding memory. At some point she’d hoped they’d get back here. Now that they were here, she wanted to be on the water and away from the reality of what awaited her on land.
Barry, Mike, Brice and Miriam were armed. They moved cautiously toward the side of the house. Betsy stood with her children at the edge of the dock where it met the thin strip of grass that served as a backyard. The children held their mother’s hands.
Kandy looked up at Phil. “I know I’m being stupid. If anything, we’re safer on land now than we were on the boat. How many times did people try to steal from us or hurt us?”
Phil shrugged. “Five?”
“Six. Six times. We were sitting ducks out there. My rational mind tells me that. Here on land, we have room to move. We could stay here. We could go to your place. We could even venture back into Orla
ndo. The station might—”
Phil frowned. “You know that’s not true. There’s no job awaiting you, Kandy.”
Her throat tightened and tears welled in her eyes, blurring her vision. She tilted her head back and blinked to keep them at bay. “I know. That’s part of the problem. What is it I’m coming back to, Phil? I’m a television reporter. A journalist. It’s not just what I do, it’s who I am. My identity is wrapped up in telling people’s stories in ninety seconds. I run toward the sirens and into the storms. What am I without that?”
Barry turned a doorknob and shouldered open the door. Mike and Brice had rifles leveled at the opening. Neither of them fired.
“It’s clear,” Mike said and the four of them disappeared inside the house. Betsy let go of her children’s hands and put her arms around their shoulders, pulling them against her hips.
Phil put his hands on Kandy’s shoulders to draw her attention. “You’re one of the strongest people I’ve ever met. You’re a survivor. You’re a fighter. You’re smart. You’re beautiful. You’re—”
She put her hand on his chest. “Okay. I know what you’re trying to do and I appreciate it. I do. But—”
“I’m scared too,” said Phil. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Where will we live? How will we provide for ourselves?”
Phil motioned to the house at the moment the hurricane shutters buzzed and started retracting. That was a good sign. “We can’t stay here forever,” he said. “It’s not our home.”
“It’s not just that.”
Phil offered a parental narrowing of his eyes. “What else?”
Kandy looked up and sniffed. “Do you smell that?”
“Smoke.”
“Yes. That means the fires are still burning. It’s getting worse before it gets better. You’d have thought after five months we’d be able to come ashore and not worry about our safety.”
“I love you, Kandy, but that’s naïve and you know it. It could be years before things are back to normal. From the radio traffic, we already know there’s little if any organized government. Plus—”
The Scourge (Book 2): Adrift Page 5
