The Scourge (Book 2): Adrift

by Abrahams, Tom

  Neil shrugged. “Around. Hey, Trick, is there going to be enough food?”

  McQuarry liked Neil. The guy did everything asked of him. He didn’t complain. Still, his childlike behavior was an annoyance.

  He smiled. “You’ll get enough to eat. Don’t worry, Neil. I’ll make sure you get some. There’s enough.”

  There wasn’t enough for everyone. McQuarry had ten people living in the two houses he’d commandeered along the Indian River in Rockledge. The stringy meat from four fox squirrels wasn’t going to feed all of them unless he diced it up and tossed it in a stew.

  McQuarry wasn’t going to do that. The others could eat energy bars or MREs. He opened the grill again. Smoke spilled from underneath the lid.

  Fox squirrel wasn’t preferable. Eastern gray would have had more meat. But it was what it was and beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  They’d gone through the haul from the storage unit in three days. Most of the meat was bad, but some frozen chicken tenders were good enough to eat. The soups went next. They had rice. McQuarry was sick of rice.

  “Dickie didn’t catch any fish today,” said Neil. “He tried.”

  McQuarry lowered the grill lid. Two more minutes, then he could eat. He took another sip of the beer and stared past the small yard to the river. He spoke to Neil without looking away from the water. “Sometimes they’re biting. Sometimes they’re not.”

  If McQuarry never had redfish again, it would be too soon. They’d only caught trout once and snook wasn’t his favorite.

  “Dickie says he’ll catch some tomorrow,” said Neil.

  “He won’t have time tomorrow,” said McQuarry. “I’ve got other plans. Now run next door and tell folks it’s time to eat.”

  After two minutes, he popped open the grill and tonged the anemic squirrel tenders onto a plate. He unfolded a sheet of tinfoil and wrapped it haphazardly over the plate. He carried it and his beer into the house.

  It was dark inside except for the inviting glow of candlelight. It amazed McQuarry that no matter how dire the circumstances, how scarce the food, or how foul-smelling the company, candlelight could make a place feel elegant.

  Long stretches of light and shadow flickered on the walls. The house was what they called an open floor plan. If McQuarry stood in the middle of the family room, he could see the dining area, the kitchen and the hallway, which led into a small foyer.

  The entirety of the downstairs was floored with twelve-by-twelve gray tiles and there were no rugs aside from a small one underneath the round glass table in the dining area, what some fancy people called “breakfast nooks.”

  Everything echoed, including the slam of the sliding glass door behind McQuarry and his boots on the floor. He set the plate and beer down on the table and crossed the space to a long sectional sofa, which filled up half the family room.

  Dickie was sleeping, his feet crossed at the ankles and hanging over one arm of the sectional. He snored.

  McQuarry moved to the sofa and yanked Dickie’s feet off the arm. “Get up. I got a job for you.”

  Dickie snorted, blinking rapidly until recognition softened his features. He sat up and yawned. Then he sniffed.

  When he started to stand, McQuarry pushed him back down and sat beside him.

  Dickie rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “Is it time for dinner?”

  McQuarry put a hand on Dickie’s thigh. “Yeah. Not for you though.”

  Dickie’s face twisted with confusion. In the candlelight he looked almost worth pitying. The soft yellow glow had a way of making everyone more palatable. Dickie could never be elegant, despite the light. Palatable was the best he could be.

  McQuarry shifted his weight on the worn cushion. “Neil tells me you ain’t catch no fish today. That right?”

  Dickie looked at his gut. Slowly, he nodded. “They wasn’t bitin’. I gave it a go. Got up early. Used my best lures. I—”

  “You didn’t catch anything, so you don’t eat. Not tonight. I figure you could skip a few meals anyhow, Dickie. You’re somehow getting bigger. After the apocalypse. Everybody else is cinching their pants tighter, but not you. How’s that figure, Dickie?”

  Dickie opened his mouth and closed it again, like a fish who refused to bite.

  McQuarry inched closer to his minion. “I’m almost thinking you caught somethin’. Trout? Then you fixed it up good. I mean trout’s good eatin’, right? Hard to wait. Hard to share.”

  Dickie swallowed hard. “No, you got it all wrong, Trick. I didn’t do that. I swear. They wasn’t bitin’ today. I wouldn’t hold out on you or nobody. Like you said, we all family and such. I wouldn’t do that to family.”

  Dickie wasn’t skimming food or anything else. In fact, it looked like he had lost weight. He almost had a jawline now. And losing weight for big people was hard under any circumstances. His mother was a big woman. She’d tried all her life to get thin. It never worked.

  Sometimes being big wasn’t somebody’s fault, they were just born that way. And sometimes, McQuarry decided, being mean wasn’t somebody’s fault either. They were born that way.

  For McQuarry, this was about power. It was about controlling people and getting them to do what he wanted. He had to break them down to build them up. Making Dickie think he was in trouble was part of the plan, so was telling that thickheaded oaf Neil that everything he did was right, reassuring him he was on the inside and would always have a seat at the table.

  “I’m not so sure I can trust you, Dickie.”

  Dickie’s eyes widened. He nodded with desperate enthusiasm. “Oh, sure you can, Trick. I’ll prove it to you. Anything you want, I’ll do it.”

  McQuarry had learned in prison that a quiet man often speaks the loudest with his mouth closed. Especially when that silence spurs someone else to speak. He remained silent.

  “Really,” Dickie said, “tell me. Whatever it is, I’ll do it. I’m loyal to you, McQuarry. You know that.”

  McQuarry narrowed his gaze and ran his teeth along his lower lip. “I’ll give you a chance to prove it. We got somethin’ comin’ up.”

  Dickie’s body sagged as if McQuarry’s words released the building tension in his shoulders and face. “I do appreciate you. Thanks for letting me prove—”

  McQuarry slapped Dickie on the knee and stood. “That’s enough for now. Go upstairs and get the others. It’s time for them to eat.”

  The rear door slid open, riding rough on its track and Neil stepped into the room. He shut the door behind him and stepped over to the table, where the strips of squirrel rested under the tinfoil.

  McQuarry watched him for a second and then called over to him. “You tell the others?”

  Neil nodded. “I did. They’re coming. I think they’re bringing rice. Winter was boiling a pot.”

  Winter was McQuarry’s common-law wife and his right hand. They’d met at a strip club where Winter served drinks and other things. She was crafty, resourceful and, like him, was one who seized opportunity.

  No sooner had Neil said her name than she pulled open the slider and bulled her way into the house. She had a pot of rice in one hand and some paper bowls in another. Her friend Mony was behind her, carrying two gallon jugs of water.

  They dropped their freight onto the table and stood next to one another, hands on hips. Winter motioned to the tinfoil-covered plate. “That squirrel?”

  McQuarry nodded. “Best we could do tonight.”

  “It’ll do. I can mix it with rice. Drink some water with it and we’ll go to bed full.”

  Mony rolled her eyes. “For a change.”

  McQuarry huffed. “You think you can do better? Be my guest, Mony. But so far, I ain’t seen you do much other than complain.”

  Mony clenched her jaw. She cursed at McQuarry, calling out his mother and him with a common epithet. The woman had dark eyes, jet-black hair she kept short like a man and pale white skin that looked translucent even in the candlelight. The only thing that gave her color was the red rose tattoo th
at ran along the right side of her neck. The ink had once been the name of her boyfriend, Earl, but when he’d bolted with a dancer named Jazz, she’d had the pronouncement repurposed.

  She looked young for her age, her porcelain skin giving her the appearance of a china doll and she was the photographic negative of Winter.

  Platinum blonde with tanned skin and bright blue eyes, Winter could have gone to Hollywood. That was what she always said. Then she clarified she meant California and not south Florida. Chances were she was wrong about both.

  She was pretty enough. Once. Not so much anymore. Time, cigarettes, hard liquor and circumstance made her look much older than she claimed to be. Still, she was a good partner. Tough, smart, a survivor. Winter was exactly what McQuarry wanted before the Scourge took hold and what he needed after it. And despite being Mony’s best friend, she always took McQuarry’s side when push came to shove.

  She frowned at Mony, putting a hand on her shoulder. “C’mon now. No need to fight. Not tonight.”

  Mony took a step back. McQuarry winked at her.

  Winter pivoted and put her hand on his chest. “You too, big boy. No need to be all antagonistic and such. Let’s eat.”

  While McQuarry uncovered the plate, revealing the meager main course, the pounding of feet rumbling down the stairs signaled the arrival of the rest of the dinner party.

  Rose and Mary Rusk, the twins, were the first into the family room. They were in their early twenties. They’d lived in the apartment next door to Mony and one of them was dating the bouncer from the club where Winter and Mony worked.

  The bouncer was Cooper James. McQuarry wasn’t sure whether he was hooked up with Rose or Mary. It didn’t matter to him and he’d never taken the time to figure out which of the full-figured women was which.

  He lumbered into the room with his brothers, Danny and Cal. The three of them together were a trio with whom to be reckoned. Mean as fighting dogs, all of them were petty crooks who’d done time for minor drug offenses, auto theft and burglaries.

  McQuarry kept the men at arm’s length, never letting them know too much about what he had planned. Unlike Neil and Dickie, the James boys weren’t feckless. Under the right circumstances, McQuarry could see them mounting a coup. But he needed muscle. As loyal as Neil and Dickie might be, they wouldn’t be the ones to get him out of a pickle if need be. McQuarry understood that as civilization soured post-Scourge, he’d find plenty of pickles.

  To keep them on a leash, he gave them the entire upstairs of the larger house and let them eat first at mealtime. That was what you did with fighting dogs.

  The James boys stomped over to the table and crowded around the plate. All three grumbled their complaints.

  Cooper was the loudest. “This ain’t a meal. This here’s a snack. What is this? Squirrel?”

  Despite that, he took a generous helping and dumped a pile of rice over it. He motioned with his chin toward McQuarry and held out his plate. “You cook this?”

  McQuarry nodded. “Grilled it. I know it ain’t much. I got plans to fix that.”

  Cooper grunted and found a spot on the floor across from the sofa. He pressed his back against the wall and slid down, holding his grub with both hands.

  His brothers joined him. The trio huddled together, grunting and chomping their food.

  The women sat at the table. Winter, Mony, Rose and Mary took small portions. They nibbled and picked at their plates.

  McQuarry sat on the sofa, Neil and Dickie on either side of him. Neither McQuarry nor Dickie ate anything. McQuarry slurped on another beer, wincing at the aftertaste when he swallowed.

  Once the sounds of eating had diminished and conversations grew louder, McQuarry got up from the sofa. He went over to the table and took the serving spoon from the rice pot.

  He banged the spoon against his empty bottle. “All right. Time to talk. I need everybody listening, no interruptions. You got something to say, you wait until I tell you it’s okay to say it.”

  One of the James boys belched. Another cleared his throat with a nasty phlegmatic sound. The women adjusted their chairs at the table to face the same direction. The candlelight was enough that McQuarry could see their forms if not their faces.

  He stood in the middle of the room. “All right, here’s the deal. We’ve pretty much exhausted what we’ve got around us. The goods from the storage unit are pretty much gone. We took everything we could from the guy’s house a block up. We need to look in a different direction if we’re gonna do better than squirrel meat and rice. And it’s only so long before we lose the upper hand. Things are chaotic now. We need to get while the getting’s good. We need to spread our wings.”

  He held his arms out at his sides and flapped his hands. Scanning what he could see of the faces of the nine others, he had their attention.

  “We’re a small group. Just ten of us. We’re not a militia. I heard some groups of thirty or more are starting to stake out territories and such. They’re taking up properties a little inland and making them compounds. Like forts. We can’t do that.”

  One of the James boys coughed. McQuarry couldn’t tell which one, but it sounded like a legitimate cough, not the insolent kind someone barks when they disagree with a premise.

  “I say we go toward the coast. Stake out a couple of neighborhoods, look for some good places to hit. I’ve already made some notes on a map. I’ll take two of you to recon. Then we hit it. Cocoa Beach.”

  Nobody spoke. McQuarry remembered he’d told them not to say anything without his permission. “Any thoughts?”

  Cooper James wiped his face with his hand and then ran it along his jaw. “What about hitting houses on this street? Other than these two, the only one we inventoried was the one of that dude you killed at the storage unit. Seems to me there’s plenty of other houses we could check out.”

  McQuarry shook his head. “There’s nothing here. We checked already.”

  Danny James wiggled his finger as if pointing to things beyond the walls of the house. “What about other streets in the neighborhood? I mean, why we gotta go all the way to Cocoa Beach?”

  Cooper shook a finger at his brother and added, “Yeah. Why Cocoa Beach? I mean, how we even gonna get there? That’s two bridges to cross. And I heard they got checkpoints every so often. Why not the neighborhood around here?”

  McQuarry nodded. He had to give a little to get a little. “You’re right. We gotta deal with checkpoints. Here’s the thing, though. We get to Cocoa Beach and we got the ocean in front of us. If we can’t find something easy, we take a boat. We go up and down the coastline until we find something. In the meantime, we fish or whatever. It gives us more possibilities. I worked over there doing construction. Handyman stuff, you know? Lots of rich people on the coast. Lots of nice things. Plus I know my way around a bit. I can navigate it without Google maps.”

  “That didn’t answer my brother’s question,” said Cooper. “Why not stick around the neighborhood? See what’s what? We’ve laid low for a few weeks, living off what we got. We ain’t even tried the area. Seems to me that Cocoa Beach is pie in the sky when we got cake right here on the ground.”

  McQuarry didn’t much care for the metaphor, but he understood it. He folded his arms across his chest and took the temperature of the room. Neil and Dickie would do whatever he said; the James boys were gonna have each other’s backs. The women were the key. He jutted his chin at Winter. “What you think, girl?”

  Winter leaned back in her chair. Its feet scraped against the tile. Her eyes moved between the James boys and McQuarry. “I think you’re both right. Trick, you’ve got us this far and we done good. I think getting to the coast is a good thing. But Coop’s right that we ain’t even tried much around here. Maybe we do both. We check around here and make plans to leave.”

  McQuarry clenched his jaw but did everything he could to hide his disappointment. He’d hoped she’d side with him and silently cursed himself for asking her opinion in front of everyone. Yet he
trusted her judgment. She was smart. Street smart.

  He relaxed his jaw. “Okay, let’s do that. I’m all about making sure we do what’s best for us even if it means not doing what I think is best for us. Let’s try the neighborhood. See what’s what. Tomorrow, I want Danny, Cal and Neil doing a sweep. Take notes, figure out which houses might be ripe for the picking. Cooper and Dickie are coming with me. We’re checking out the 520 bridge. We get across to Merritt Island and go from—”

  “Hold up,” said Cooper. “Why I gotta go with you? It was my idea to check the houses around here.”

  McQuarry smiled the kind of smile that lacked humor. It was the smile of a man restraining himself from a more violent response. He stepped forward so he could look down on Cooper, who sat on the floor with his back to the wall. “First, don’t interrupt me again, son. You do and you’ll get to make all your decisions out on your own. And to this point, while I hear you make hay about things, you ain’t brought a lot to the party.”

  Cooper started to stand from a cross-legged position. McQuarry stuck out his leg and put a boot on the man’s ankle to keep him on the ground.

  “Second, it wasn’t your idea. It was your brother’s. He’s doing what he suggested.”

  Cooper wriggled free of McQuarry’s boot but didn’t try to stand. He pulled his knees to his chest like a pouting child. He scowled, McQuarry’s body blocking the flickering light from hitting his face.

  “Third, this is my place. My team, my rules. You do as I say.”

  McQuarry took a step back and moved toward the center of the room again. He scanned the group as he spoke, the mask of his smile returning. “Now, I think I’ve been more than fair. Let’s clean up, get some shut-eye and start fresh in the morning.” He clapped his hands to signal the end of the meeting.

  An hour later, he was in the backyard, sipping on a third bitter beer, Winter next to him. They were alone, sitting in molded plastic chairs and looking up at the cloudless night sky. A citronella candle burned between them on a four-legged molded plastic table. Its sweet scent was calming.

  Winter reached out and put her hand on his arm. “You handled that right, giving Cooper a taste, you know? I know you don’t like them, but you need them.”