McQuarry felt the anger well from his gut. It spread hot into his chest. His face reddened and he clenched his jaw so tight he thought he might break a tooth. There was a need to get along and then there was a need to put a boy in his place.
Without warning McQuarry pulled the knife from his hip, spun one hundred eighty degrees and had the tip of blade pushed into the soft spot between Cooper’s chin and throat. One push and the knife would shish kabab the kid’s tongue. Cooper froze, his pupils dilated. McQuarry pushed close to the younger man to prevent him from lifting the shotgun.
“Don’t test me, boy,” McQuarry growled. “You don’t like the way I do things, you can take your brothers and your women and whoever else you want and you can beat it. Leave. Head out on your own and see how long you survive. You can’t hunt, you can’t fish, you can barely wipe your—”
Dickie put a hand on McQuarry’s shoulder. His tremulous voice was an octave higher than normal. “Guys. C’mon, we don’t need to do this.”
Neither man flinched. Cooper was a worthy and unwanted adversary. The kid had shown a flash of impetuousness by killing the two batsmen. If he was that quick to pull the trigger, what did it mean for him? The irony of the thoughts milling through McQuarry’s mind wasn’t lost on him as he held a knife to the unpredictable and dangerous Cooper James.
Dickie tried again. “C’mon, Trick. Please. Let’s not do this. Cooper did the right thing. You did the right thing. We’re wasting time here. We should go.”
McQuarry lowered the knife and backed away. He slid the knife back into its sheath and held the rifle with both hands. “Dickie’s got a point. We need to go. See what’s what. I shouldn’t be wasting my time on you.”
McQuarry turned away from Cooper and started toward the bridge. With both men behind him and unable to see his face, he cursed himself again. This kid Cooper was going to be a problem. There was no undoing that. His own temper only served to exacerbate the issue between them, making things worse than they needed to be.
The new world, like prison, was difficult enough to navigate without making unneeded enemies. And like prison, McQuarry understood that this beef between the two of them, this struggle for control, would end with one of them dead.
He stepped onto 520 and waited for the others to pull even. McQuarry didn’t want Cooper at his back. Cooper slowed when he reached McQuarry and appeared to match his pace. The kid must’ve felt the same way.
They started across the bridge, maneuvering around unguarded concrete barricades placed in a serpentine pattern on the two eastbound lanes. McQuarry stepped over shreds of torn brown plastic he recognized as the packaging for MREs. There were Juuls and vape pens along with empty juice boxes. The abandoned checkpoint was more trash ridden than some of the neighborhoods through which he’d traveled.
The road ascended in a slope toward the middle of the river. McQuarry looked south. The water reflected the sun in white flashes on the succession of small waves moving with the current. The river was more than one hundred fifty miles long. It was brackish—part fresh, part saltwater—and extended from Ponce Inlet north of New Smyrna Beach and flowed all the way south of Jupiter Inlet.
He’d always liked the water. It made him think of far-off places, places he’d never see but about which he could dream. In far-off places, Trick McQuarry could be someone else. He could turn over a new leaf. He could…hell, who was he kidding? McQuarry understood who he was at his core. Either born a heathen or forged into one through life’s circumstances, he was a man who would always be grounded on the foul side of things. It didn’t matter where a river led or to what shores an ocean might carry him.
Dickie interrupted his thoughts and drew his attention to the checkpoint on the westbound lanes. The kid nudged him with his fleshy hand. “They’re letting us go. Not even trying to stop us.”
“Don’t look at ’em, moron,” Cooper snapped. “Act like you been here before, like you know where you’re going and ain’t got no questions about it.”
Dickie frowned, looking to McQuarry for support.
McQuarry shrugged. “He’s right, Dickie. Keep your eyes straight ahead. Less we notice them, the less they notice us.”
Truth was, McQuarry was surprised at the lack of interest from the soldiers positioned yards from them across the small gap between parallel bridges. The sentries were armed with high-powered rifles. They easily could have stopped McQuarry and his men if they chose. Apparently they didn’t choose. Was apathy setting in? If so, this was a good thing. The less inclined authority figures were to challenge them, the more opportunities they’d have to advance their own goals.
Anarchy in a prison could be a good thing. Riots were dangerous, sure. And without the guards telling them what to do and where to go, the apex predators employed the most extreme behavior.
The lawlessness never lasted long. The cavalry always came to the rescue of the establishment. The bosses restored order. They isolated the threats and dealt with them. The repercussions for breaking the rules could be prohibitively punitive for anyone considering a future insurrection.
But out here in a prison yard without walls, where the guards didn’t seem to care who did what or to whom, the lawlessness might last a long time. The threats would widen. The repercussions for breaking rules that no longer existed carried no teeth. This was the current and future insurrection rolled into one.
A smile spread across his face as McQuarry marched the incline toward the center of the river. They passed a boat launch to the south and walked over only water now, a breeze carrying across his face from north to south. The briny scent of the ocean brought with it the sour stench of a wharf. There was no wharf in sight. No cadre of fishing vessels moored, having returned from deep-sea angling. McQuarry wondered if this was the smell of the world now. Death and salt.
He carried his Mossberg in both hands. Since Winter had handed it to him hours ago, he’d already killed with it once. He rubbed his thumb across the smooth barrel. His finger rested on the trigger guard. Though never formally trained, he knew enough about weapons that the only time to put a finger on the trigger was when he intended to press it.
McQuarry sensed Cooper at his shoulder. The kid didn’t have the same stride as McQuarry, he had short legs and an absurdly long torso for his size, so his steps were exaggerated more so than the fatigued Dickie.
Cooper worked to keep pace with McQuarry. There was a swagger in McQuarry’s walk born from the need to exude confidence. The worst thing a man could do was let the predators around him know he was easy prey.
“How long did you spend inside?” Cooper asked amid long strides that appeared almost comical, like someone consciously avoiding cracks in a sidewalk.
The question surprised McQuarry, but he didn’t let on. He didn’t bother to look at the kid, making him ask again.
Cooper obliged. “Did you hear me?”
McQuarry rubbed the barrel. “I heard you. I’m doing the math.”
Cooper shortened his stride now and quickened his pace. He marched a step ahead of McQuarry, alternating glances between the road ahead and McQuarry.
“Seven. That’s hard time. Not counting the days stuck in county.”
“How long in county?”
“Shoot, I don’t know,” McQuarry said, as if talking about something he couldn’t be bothered to remember.
He remembered. No man who spent time in a cell forgot how long he’d been there. Even old-timers could count the minutes. It didn’t matter if it was a holding cell in a muni jail or solitary in a federal pen. Like an elephant, he remembered. Time was slow inside. There was plenty of it to count.
McQuarry took a hand from the Mossberg and rubbed his chin. The stubble scratched against the side of his index finger. It was a pleasant sensation. He rubbed it again. “Six.”
“Six months?” Dickie was interested now.
With a chuckle, McQuarry answered, “Years.”
Cooper narrowed an eye with suspicion. “How does anyon
e spend six years in county? They can’t keep you more than a year.”
“It adds up,” said McQuarry. “A night here, a month there. Trials get delayed, lawyers quit, judges go on vacation, bail money doesn’t show up. You’d be surprised.”
In front of them, twenty feet above the bridge, a small laughing gull rode the air. Its gray wings extended, it held its altitude. Its white body glided effortlessly past them and made a wide, swooping arc that brought it back in front of them. It dipped its dark head and landed on the railing of the eastbound bridge and joined a colony of brothers and sisters killing time.
They were almost to the halfway point of the bridge, where the bifurcated east and westbound sides joined into a single expanse. The fronts of McQuarry’s legs burned with the effort of having walked the incline with added weight on his back and the burden of the rifle in his hands. His mouth was dry. He poked his tongue along the corner of his mouth and tasted the strands of thick white spittle formed there from lack of hydration.
“Let’s stop for a second,” he said. “Get some water. Take a look through the binoculars.”
Cooper pivoted as he kept walking. Like a turret he spun three hundred sixty degrees, scanning the surroundings before he stopped in the middle of the road. His face was squeezed into a frown. Sunlight reflected in the thin sheen of perspiration that ringed his eyes.
He jutted his chin. “We’re kind of exposed here, ain’t we? Out in the open?”
McQuarry shrugged off his pack one shoulder at a time and dropped it to the street. He squatted, butt on heels and laid the rifle alongside him. “Exposed to what? The gulls? They don’t care. They ain’t armed with nothing. Nobody cares we’re here. Dickie can stand watch while you and I get a drink, refresh ourselves. Then I can scope out the far side of the bridge while Dickie gets his.”
McQuarry hoped giving Cooper preference over Dickie might flatter him, ease the constant undercurrent of tension. His father had told him once that dogs had power figured out. The dog who ate first had the power. Didn’t matter its size. McQuarry always remembered the lesson.
“If you got two dogs,” his father had said in the yard one overcast afternoon, “you can make one the alpha by how you treat it.”
McQuarry had listened, somewhat distracted by the flashes of lightning beyond the guard tower. Thunder had rolled across the thick haze of rain-laden clouds that frequently dampened midafternoons in Florida during the spring and summer.
His father had spoken with his hands, gnarled and yellowed from fighting and smokes. “You take the smaller one and let it eat first. Tell the bigger, stronger one it’s gotta wait. Make it sit there on its haunches watching the little one gobble up the goodies. It’ll lick its chops and drool something awful, but you make it wait until almost nothing is left. Then you let it eat. After a while, that big dog is gonna wait for the little one to go first no matter what you do. Then the little dog is lifting its leg to piss, marking its territory and that big dog squats like a girl. Even if it’s a boy. It’ll squat, subservient and all to the little dog you made king.”
Now on the bridge, years later, McQuarry was hoping to play the same psychological game with his biggest threat. He had to let Cooper think he was almost his equal. Give him enough power to feel good about it. Not too much. It was a delicate balance and McQuarry was exhausted thinking about all the things he had to consider.
From an insulated flask, he drew a long pull of air-temperature water. He resisted the urge to gulp. After a healthy swallow, he wiped his mouth with the back of his arm. Dickie stood guard, his feet spread shoulder-width apart. He held the rifle like a sentry, both hands wrapped around it with the barrel aimed diagonally skyward. He kept his head on a swivel despite the lack of threats.
Cooper had the Glock 19 on his hip. His shotgun was next to him on the cracked asphalt that spanned the length of the bridge. He was on one knee, his pack in front of him. From it, he plucked a canteen. His sweaty fingers unscrewed the cap and it plopped against the side of the neoprene insulator that wrapped the oblong flask. Cooper lifted the opening to his mouth and tipped back his head, drawing a slow drink. He guzzled, sounding like a child gulping juice from a sippy cup. A stream of water dripped down the side of his face. Once he’d had his fill, he exhaled loudly and lowered the canteen.
McQuarry turned his attention from his comrades to the binoculars. He aimed them at the far end of the bridge, where it connected to Merritt Island. Closer now, he could see there weren’t two checkpoints. There was one that spanned the width of the bridge. It stretched across the entirety of the roadway; the blocks of concrete and striped orange and white traffic barriers were arranged like serpentine cues. The blockade was similar to the one on the western edge of the bridge, but larger and more complex.
There was nobody trying to emigrate from the island. And he and his men were the only ones on their way to enter it.
The guards were armed, but appeared relaxed. Thin fingers of smoke rose above two of them. The white puffs were thick near their heads and lifted into a particulate fog that disappeared the higher it went. The men were smoking.
McQuarry imagined the guards, or anyone working for the government, had access to whatever they wanted: smokes, food, liquor. Just like lockup, the guards were the gatekeepers in every way imaginable.
He swept the field glasses north and adjusted the focus by twisting the ring between the twin eyepieces. Closer to them was a small island in the river not far from the Merritt Island side of the bridge. It appeared to be a park that extended like a long finger south of the westbound lanes and then spread underneath both sides of the bridge, ending a few yards from the shore of the island.
There were splashes of color on the island he hadn’t noticed before. Truthfully, he hadn’t noticed the island at all until now. He’d been so focused on the checkpoint at the far side of the bridge, he’d looked right past the small amorphous splotch of land.
McQuarry took his eyes from the binoculars for a moment to think. As many times as he’d crossed 520 going one way or the other, he’d never paid any attention to the island. How had he missed it all this time? He wondered how many other things he’d overlooked in his everyday life pre-Scourge that were right in front of him all along.
Winter often told him his biggest problem, among many, was his indifference to detail. He never spotted the little things, the things that might make the difference between success and failure. That inattention, she’d said in the heat of arguments, was why he’d spent so much time locked up and why she’d spent more on bail money than he’d ever been good enough to steal.
McQuarry lifted the binoculars again and recognized the colors—red, blue, bright green—as tents. More freaking tents. There were eleven of them on the island before Merritt Island. They were pitched close together on the southern finger of the island in what looked like a parking lot.
No people milled about. The fabric walls of the tents flapped in the breeze as if they were breathing. Sucked in and pushed out. In and out. McQuarry wondered how many colonies of people subsisted like this. Why weren’t they in empty houses or condos? The central Florida coast was replete with empty properties, places owned by lawyers in Chicago or doctors in Minneapolis who liked having a place to stay twice a year and an investment to rent on home-share apps.
It didn’t occur to him that flopping in someone else’s place wasn’t legal. Regardless of whether laws existed anymore, the idea of squatting or commandeering things and places that didn’t belong to him was part of McQuarry’s DNA. It would be difficult to help him understand that the end of the world as they knew it didn’t necessarily warp everyone’s morality. At least not only months into it. There was no telling what direction the compass might point two years or a decade post-Scourge. None of that, however, was on McQuarry’s radar. He was all about getting his now.
He adjusted the focus ring again and panned back to the far end of the bridge. It might take them another fifteen or twenty minutes to get there.
Plenty of time to cross the checkpoint, do a little reconnaissance and head back to Rockledge before the sun dropped from the sky.
His eyes fell on the smoking guards. They leaned against a tapered orange and white barricade. Neither seemed engaged at first. Then at the same time, both snapped their attention beyond his field of view. McQuarry lifted his eyes from the binoculars, trying to gauge where the men were looking. He couldn’t tell from this far. He squinted, trying to better see, but it didn’t help.
He peered through the binoculars again, played with the focus and found the guards. They were at attention now. Their postures and demeanors markedly different than before, the men were all business. McQuarry could tell even from his distance.
Carefully, he panned to the right, toward the direction the men faced and saw a cluster of people moving toward the guards. Three men and a woman. Two of the men looked younger than the third. The woman was middle-aged. Only one of them walked with confidence. He was the tallest of the four and carried a spear gun. McQuarry refocused on him.
He spoke aloud without realizing it. “Is that a spear gun? What in the actual—”
“What?” asked Dickie. “Who’s got what?”
McQuarry kept his eyes on the quartet as they approached the bridge. “Nothing. Hang on.”
The oldest of them held a rifle by the butt stock in one hand. It looked awkward. He had his other hand in the air.
The woman, who wore a small backpack, had both her hands raised. The shorter of the two younger men had a shotgun resting on one shoulder. He reminded McQuarry of the fraternity guys with false confidence who’d hit up women at bars with their platinum cards, expensive watches and late model foreign leases. McQuarry immediately disliked him.
The older man and the woman didn’t look like a couple. They didn’t carry themselves with affection for one another. Neither of them was old enough to be parents of the younger two. Brothers and sisters? No. None of them resembled the other. At least not from this distance.
The Scourge (Book 2): Adrift Page 17
