“Wait,” I say. “You haven’t seen her since yesterday afternoon? She didn’t come home last night?”
Vargas laughs, offering me a wink and a grin. “I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t there, either.” Then, more seriously, he adds, “Well, she must have. The bed was slept in. I like to keep it neat and square, but she can’t be bothered. You know how she is. She’s messy with all of her toys.”
Vargas looks wistful for a moment. I am reminded that Braithwaite is more adventurous than he. “I’m sorry you’re in the middle of all this,” I say.
“I love her,” he says with a shrug. “We all do.”
It would be simpler to think that Owen may have been killed by one of Braithwaite’s other lovers—an act unrelated to the things Owen needed to tell. That kind of murderer would be so much easier to track down than one dealing in codes and secrets and conspiracies. But the power company has been a carefree polyamorous community for years now. None of them would consider him a threat.
Yet as I walk back to my station, I see Micah Abraham approaching me with agitated speed. For a moment I consider that I may be wrong after all: as the head of the solar power group, he was one of the first of Braithwaite’s partners apart from Vargas, and he has shared her bed on and off for years. Heavy-set, with dry tanned skin from constant work outdoors and only the fragmentary remains of a head of hair, he comes at me like a rhino. His yellow headphones and ancient cassette tape player jostle on his belt, slapping against his thick thigh.
Sweat stains the front and armpits of his tee shirt, and I can smell his body as he thrusts his hands against my shoulders, shoving me into a tree in the middle of the plaza. I tense up and almost strike back. I hold a hand up to separate us, but he doesn’t go for me a second time.
“What’s wrong with you?” Maybe there are motives among Braithwaite’s lovers. The surprise of his attack is rearranging my thoughts.
“What is it now?” he growls loudly, his voice pitching up under the fat in his neck. Others in the street stop what they’re doing.
“Micah! What are you talking about?”
He stabs a meaty finger in the air behind him, pointing at a nearby rooftop covered with solar panels. “I saw you from up there, going into Belinda’s. I know you talked to her. Are you going to throw her out, too? It’s always the same with you, Edison.”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with that,” I tell him, but I don’t expect him to listen. It has been years, and Micah still holds a grudge against me for forcing one of his partners out of the Little Five. He hasn’t trusted me since then, and I haven’t tried to repair the breach.
“It has everything to do with that,” he insists. “We always got under your skin. And now you think she killed that stranger.”
“You’re not—” I start, but he doesn’t let me finish. He telegraphs his punch with all of his excess weight, making it easy for me to slip under, and my own follow-up just below his solar plexus takes the wind out of him.
He stumbles back, gasping, and I grab a fistful of his stinking shirt. I want to do more. I’m angry enough. “And it’s always the same with you, Micah. The last time we danced this dance I had to lock you up for a week. Is that how this goes again?”
He pushes at me, separating me from his shirt, but doesn’t take another swing. “It should’ve been you that got shot,” he mutters as soon as he has his breath back. “Don’t take her away from me, too.”
The pathetic whine in his voice softens my aggravation. Like Braithwaite, despite his age, he’s still something of a child. “What makes you think I’m going to take Belinda away? All she’s done is answer questions. Despite what you think, I don’t care what any of you do. It’s not my concern. What is my concern is how you’re behaving right now. Making threats. But I’m going to be charitable. I’ll assume I’m the only target of your frustration and that you’re not going to throw a punch at anyone else. Don’t make me regret it.”
Kloves stands in the entrance to the station, watching us. I wave him over and tell him to escort Micah home and to make sure he doesn’t come back out until he’s calmed down.
“Are you sure, boss?” he asks.
Abraham was the same way the last time. Fury and frustration, then a long stretch of silent hurt, until he came back to himself, and the only lasting mark was his mistrust of me. “He’s not really going to do anything he can’t take back. Are you, Micah?”
“Fuck you.”
Kloves nods, as if that were confirmation. He grabs Micah by the elbow and urges him away. I watch them leave and try not to let Micah’s accusations echo in my head. I made the right decisions. Most of the citizens of the Little Five backed me up. But the power company has always been insular and a little strange. Young and smart and necessary, they think of themselves as a world apart from everyone else. I don’t let it get to me.
Luther is asleep on the cot in the cell when I arrive. I sit down at my desk and unfold Owen’s cipher papers, pretending to make heads or tails of them. I must be making too much noise, because Luther wakes and gives me a sour look as she comes out of the cell. She makes a point of yawning deeply before she says, “Any progress?”
“Apart from getting Micah to throw a punch at me? If you want to call that progress.” I shrug, not bothering to explain. “I need you to go back to the apartment,” I tell her. “See if you can find anything there that looks like this.” I hand her the cipher pages.
“Where’d this come from?” she asks. She shuffles through the sheets, wearing the same expression I must have had when I found them.
“Have you seen it before?” I ask.
“No, I don’t think so. What is it?”
“I don’t know yet. They were under a sofa cushion. I think Owen was planning to bring them to me. I’m guessing they had something to do with Dahlonega. There’s probably nothing else up there, but it’s worth checking.”
Luther hands the pages back to me. She sighs her frustration and spins on her heels. “All right. I’ll ransack the apartment again, and maybe something will turn up.”
Again, I am alone, staring at Owen’s papers until I can build up enough inner motion to get back on my feet. I’ve been approaching the problem from Owen’s side; now it’s time to look into Abigail. That path leads me first to Phoebe Weeks.
At this time of day, Phoebe will be with her mother, making sandwiches for people unwilling or unable to make their own meals. When I step outside the station, Regina’s stall is being inundated by a good third of the Little Five’s population. Some of them continue to titter about my fight with Abraham, probably embellishing it into some Wild West tale of revenge and avarice while they conduct their business in the street. Others whisper about Owen and Abigail, though few ever spoke to them at length, and their interest is only morbid curiosity. Most, however, share stories about Lukacs and Yanic, weaving an oral history of the Little Five that we will pass on to the next generation.
Early on, the original leaders of the Little Five tried to rebuild the local economy according to sensible capitalist principles, but it didn’t work. Our second, successful attempt became something that one of the power company people likes to call a “low resolution simulacrum of society.” Everyone fits into his or her own niche, helping to maintain the Little Five however he or she can best contribute, and all of our needs are taken care of by those who can best do those jobs. Farmers, doctors, cooks, bakers, police, and so on. All the roles and responsibilities that an eight-year-old conceives of as the depth and breadth of adult reality.
To this we added our interactions with the outside world: the enclaves, communes, and neighborhoods that appeared around us. Some of them are urban, like ours, but most are rural. We provide bread, biodiesel, and the technical and mechanical expertise of our power company. Others provide food that we can’t grow ourselves. From the Inman Park enclave and some others we receive the vegetable oil and cook fire leavings that Braithwaite needs to make her fuel.
All of this together explains why Regina is such a popular figure in the Little Five and elsewhere. There is a semi-truck operated by a town in Clayton County that we keep running and filled with biodiesel, and once a month that truck delivers bushels of wheat flour and other necessities for Regina’s baking empire. Most of her bread then finds its way around Georgia, which in turn brings in more fresh and used vegetable oil. It would not be an exaggeration to think of Regina as one of our post-collapse commodity barons, alongside Braithwaite and Vargas.
Her daughter has grown up steeped in this responsibility. I find her handing out sandwiches to a couple of children at the front of the growing line, her bright smile shared with everyone equally. But I’ve known her since she was seven years old, and that smile is the one she learned from her stepfather, the mayor. She knows how to make her eyes look like they are a part of the expression, and right now her eyes are smiling much too hard.
I bypass the line and come to the side of the stall where Regina is removing bread from a basket. She notices me after a few moments. “Come around the back,” she says to me just above a whisper, and I go to the entrance flap of the covered stall. She joins me outside, arms crossed as if to ward off the implications of my arrival. “Tell me you know who did it,” she says, and her tone refuses to accept anything other than a yes.
“I need to speak to your daughter,” I say, holding the flap open. “I need to ask her some questions about the girl.”
“It’s not a good time.” Regina takes a step back, blocking my way, though I haven’t moved any closer to the stall. “I’m trying to keep her busy. Talking to you isn’t going to help. She doesn’t know anything.”
“You can’t be sure of that, Regina.”
“Yes, Sam, I can. They’re just—” Regina turns her head, shutting her eyes as if deflecting a painful memory. “Abby was a child. I told Phoebe not to go prying into things that weren’t her business.”
“Can you at least tell me if Abigail said anything to you? Was she worried that someone would follow them here?”
The iron in Regina’s eyes flickers and fades when the question sinks in. “So it wasn’t one of us,” she says softly. “Thank God.”
“I didn’t say that,” I point out. “We don’t know yet. But I’m guessing she didn’t say someone was after her.”
“Well—” Regina begins. Now she steps fully out of the stall and closes the flap. “Look, Sam, I don’t want to get my daughter involved in this.”
“If you know anything at all,” I say. “It’s important. You know it is.”
“Well, you know Abigail spent a night at our place, before they got their own. They were in Phoebe’s room, and it was late, and I was checking on the girls. And I overheard them, the two of them.
“I hate to say this, Sam, but sometimes it seems to me that you were lucky. With Jeannie, I mean. The world wasn’t exactly lollipops and sunbeams before, but back then there were buffers between the good things and the bad. I made it my business to get in between and to try to do good. But I saw my share of horrors, and you know what it was like. It’s so much harder now. You try to shield your child from the worst of it, but in the end, there’s still that fence. Closed doors and high walls that we need to keep out the nightmares. And when something gets through, what can you do?
“I heard Abigail talking about what happened to her. She didn’t go into detail, but she talked about the men. Phoebe knows enough. She’s sixteen, and I taught her. She understood. I so desperately wanted to interrupt them, but I couldn’t. Abigail deserved not to feel shame. Responsibility. It was as important that I let her talk as it was important that I protect my own daughter. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” I say, helping her to continue. I don’t want to hear it; I don’t want to remember Abigail’s scars. But this is important, and this isn’t about me.
“She also talked about when she was little.” Regina’s eyes shimmer with held-back tears. “She didn’t know where she came from. She said she was ‘taken.’ That’s the word she used. ‘Taken.’ And then she ended up in Dahlonega, though that wasn’t the first place she went. They brought her to a house where she was both the housekeeper and—” Regina sighs hard through a tensed throat. “Owen was the man’s brother. Owen didn’t live there. He didn’t know. Until later. But that’s not the important thing. The way Abigail was talking, I got the impression—Sam. Sam. I don’t think she was the only one.”
DAY ELEVEN, 10:00 A.M.
During the night, nightmares came, dragging memories of Jeannie with them. In them, she was four years old, as she always is. She remains as she was when she was happy and safe. My heart aches more thinking of her that way, but I prefer it to the memory of her last hours.
There was a time when I considered being a parent again. But maybe Braithwaite and Vargas and the rest of their crew have the right idea. Permanence is no longer something that we should expect, or perhaps even desire. We lose more than we gain. I certainly don’t begrudge anyone the desire for children, even in this place, but there is hardly a life to be had here. We are only biding our time before the end of all things. The hollow-heads will inherit the earth.
And perhaps they should. A society that permits its adults to abuse its children, simulacrum or no, does not deserve survival. It never did, but we were too invested in our own self-absorptions to know it. We kept ourselves entertained, living for weekends and vacations that only served to remind us that we were trapped in lives not of our choosing. We didn’t understand just how unprepared we were to extricate ourselves from the filaments and knots of our pointless greed. When the old world’s human monsters came, we did our best to ignore them. And when the new world’s monsters came, we died.
And so our children died. Jeannie first. Now Abigail. And yet she, Abigail, died at the hands of an old monster: a remnant of that greed-drenched world we left behind us. We thought that by keeping to our boundaries, by not making an effort to fully restore the corridors between this community and the next, we would be safe. But we were already infected by another disease. Infected by human nature. From time immemorial, with no cure to be had. I wanted to believe that we’d changed, that our terrors made us better than we were. Maybe that was naïve. I should have known. I do know. There is no escape but survival.
Someone killed Abigail and Owen because they represented a hell that was meant to be kept a secret. A hell that is worse than the one filled with hollow-heads and shriekers: a hell that chooses its victims deliberately. And Abigail was not the only one. While we go about our lives here in the Little Five, a machine has been grinding up children into fodder for an insatiable perversion. Thinking of it makes me sick to my stomach, but ignoring it only makes me feel guilty. So I focus on my piece of the problem. I don’t really believe that pulling a single thread will unravel the whole tapestry, but maybe I can lie to myself for a little while longer.
A few hours after dawn, word comes over the shortwave radio that the trading group from Clarke County is arriving, in a caravan of two biodiesel U-Haul trucks and a battery-powered University of Georgia campus bus. Vargas brings this to my attention so that I can coordinate the sweep team to be ready for their arrival, but there will be little for me to do once the traders arrive. The mayor’s office handles the operation, since Weeks set up most of the trading network in the first place. I handle security, but we’ve been doing this so long that everyone already knows how best to avoid a hollow-head incursion.
So, while the rest of the Little Five succumbs to the excitement of a trading day, scouring away the recent violence, I take the opportunity to walk the perimeter myself, as if my own eyes might find something that all the others haven’t.
The only conceivable place where someone might safely come across the perimeter without leaving a trace is at the gate between the Little Five and the Inman Park enclave. But when I arrive, it is as I expected to find it: locked with the locks we have always used, and no sig
n of anyone having tried to pick them or cut the cables. As with every other section of perimeter fencing, there is a cluster of barbed wire topping the gate, and it hasn’t been disturbed.
My counterpart in the enclave is doing his own sweep of the Inman Park perimeter when I arrive, and he strides over with that combination of friendliness and suspicion to which I have become accustomed from that side of the fence. Mikhail Barkov has heavy-lidded eyes and a face that struggles to produce any expression other than bored resignation, but he is more talkative than the other peace officers over there. “Chief Edison,” he says with his strong Russian accent. His palm rests on the butt of his hip-holstered weapon, adding to the impression of a swagger. “Is there a problem?”
“Have you had any strangers visiting in the last week or so? Not a trade group, but an individual, or maybe two or three?” I wrap my fingers around portions of the chain link.
Barkov shrugs. “No one I think. But the gate has been closed, yes? No one coming or going this way except for the usual ones. For the trading. But not strangers. Hey, didn’t that one—Adelaide—yes, I like her. Adelaide was checking the fence yesterday. Or was it the day before that? I don’t remember. That’s what Andrew is saying. Are you having a problem? Trespassing?”
“No,” I say, taking a deep breath. “Some people were killed. I’m hoping it was someone from the outside. They made a hole in our fence, but I’m pretty sure that was a distraction. I thought maybe they’d tried to flee through Inman Park. But that’s looking like a dead end.”
“I will ask Andrew,” Barkov says. Andrew McGovern is what the enclave calls their “primary lookout.” A nice phrase to describe a sniper. McGovern spends his days atop the buildings of Inman Park, watching the hollow-heads, shooting when he gets bored. I suspect they’ve given McGovern that job because he’s not the sort of person you want wandering the streets, looking you in the eye.
The Post Page 7
