Through a rising wave of grief, I manage to shout for the two of them to return to the cell and shut the door. I cock the hammer for the effect it will have on them. They don’t know guns; they used Luther for that.
I have known Adelaide Luther since she was a teenager, a kid. I thought I had changed her path. I made a promise to her father. Another promise broken. Maybe the Little Five was wrong to give me this post.
I shake off the doubt. There is still work to do and no one else to do it. Phoebe is gone because of compromises I never would have made. Perhaps if I had given Luther better guidance, not thrust her into a role for which she was not prepared, she might have understood that such compromises are never acceptable, no matter how many secrets you have to give up.
But we were tainted from the beginning, when Braithwaite made the deal to keep the traffickers on the other side of the fences. In exchange for chemistry beyond my understanding, needed to make even more of the fuel that they would use to destroy families and towns and the last remaining bricks of the world’s moral foundation. And in trade for that, Braithwaite received protection for the community, and the shackles of participation through the numbers station she maintained.
Then Owen changed the equation. Whatever his experience was in Dahlonega, it taught him what to look for, and he uncovered Braithwaite’s complicity. So Braithwaite used Luther to silence the threat, leveraging whatever she knew about my deputy to get her to commit murder.
But that wasn’t enough for whoever has Braithwaite in thrall. Randall and Banderas were sent to make sure she finished the cover-up. They used Abraham’s resentment toward me to secure his cooperation. Phoebe was supposed to be insurance.
The more I play out the scenario in my baffled mind, the more I want to have let Barkov do his job. And then let him move on to Braithwaite, and Abraham, and cut them into pieces. Leave them as food for the hollow-heads.
I find Mayor Weeks at the Carter Center, where he has moved his meeting with the Inman Park leaders. I wait impatiently in his office, marveling as I always do at the large oak desk and the wall-to-wall bookshelf displaying hundreds of academic works as if they were bricks. Weeks once told me this collection is only a portion of the one he used to have, back when he was a professor. Even so, compared to my collection, this is the Library of Congress. Running my fingers over the titles brings a certain satisfaction, and some relief, while I wait.
When he finally arrives, I rush toward him. “I think I know—” I begin.
He interrupts. “You’re going to get her back,” he says, as if expecting me to be on the fence.
“Yes. Of course. If I—”
“No, Edison. I mean you. You are going to get her back. We have the peace officers from Inman Park. We can make do while you’re gone.”
“That’s what I came here to say,” I tell him. “I thought I was going to have to convince you to let me go, and not just send people from the sweep team.”
“I love Phoebe like she were my own,” Weeks says. “And after today, I don’t trust anyone else.” He chews on this for a moment. “I couldn’t face Regina if I had to tell her you were staying behind.”
“I’m going to need—”
“Anything. Take it.” Weeks sits down hard in his leather chair as if suddenly exhausted. “We can survive almost anything, Chief. But not the children. Not losing children.”
Marilyn rests a hand on my shoulder as I stare blankly at the two bodies laid out on her table. Night is falling, and burial will have to wait for tomorrow. Under better circumstances, our dead would be put in the walk-in refrigerator until morning, but Olsen is there now, fighting for his life and mind. Another casualty of my blindness.
“What are you going to do?” Marilyn asks.
Mikhail Barkov, as enigmatic as I’ve always known him, reacted to the news with his old humor. I thought he would be angry at me for wasting his chance, but he only shrugged and waved it away. Now, standing across from us on the other side of the table, he says, “We are going to find this Randall, yes?”
“Yes,” I say. “Braithwaite and Abraham are too terrified to talk—they think this is only going to make things worse—but I’ve figured out enough to know that our best chance is to head toward the Clarke County community. Tomorrow morning. I don’t want to travel in the dark. Mayor Weeks has agreed that I can be spared. You, me, Kloves. And—”
I pause. Now to broach the subject that brought me here to Marilyn’s hospital. “We need a doctor with us,” I continue. “The enclave’s doctors are here. They can take over operation of the hospital while we’re gone. I could really use you, Marilyn.”
She lets out a soft laugh. “I’m not posse material, Sam.”
“We’re not going out with a full complement of soldiers and scouts,” I explain. “It has to be small, so we don’t attract the wrong attention. But with small comes dangerous. And we don’t know what condition we’ll find Phoebe in. I’d feel a lot better with a doctor along.”
“Then take one of Inman’s docs,” Marilyn says, stepping away from me. A shadow covers her expression. “I haven’t been outside in years.”
“I need someone I can trust,” I point out. Barkov looks like he might object but keeps his silence.
“Is that all?” she asks distantly, covering Luther’s destroyed features with a sheet. She points at Barkov. “I want to talk to Sam alone.”
He nods and moves away, inspecting the tools and devices on the other side of the room.
“Please tell me this isn’t the old argument again, Sam. I’m not going to be drawn into your obsessions.”
“That’s unfair,” I tell her, surprised. “I haven’t been outside in over a year. I don’t take those risks anymore. I listened. It was too late, I know, and I understand. But eventually, Marilyn, I listened. It’s not like you to be callous.”
My response surprises her, too, and she acknowledges it with a shake of her head. “No, you’re right. But I’m not like you, either.”
“I’m not asking you for heroics. I’m asking you to help me save Phoebe.”
Marilyn clicks her tongue and furrows her brow in an expression that I used to know more intimately. She’s looking for excuses. But she recognizes what she’s doing. Unlike me, she has never succumbed to lies she’s told herself.
“I know,” she says. “Of course. But whatever you have to do when we find her, when we find them, I don’t want any part of it.” Now she looks at me directly. “I understand what you’re probably going to have to do. And I’ll find a way to be okay with that. But I don’t want any part of it.”
I dare to embrace her, feeling the familiar warmth against my arms and chest. I want to tell her that I still love her. That I wish every day I could be the person she needed.
But I can’t. I’m not. So I say only, “Thank you.”
I pack a change of clothes into a small duffel bag, then the few amenities I keep at home. Toothbrush and toothpaste, our only defense against infections of the mouth. A bottle of hydrogen peroxide, to ward off the terrible potential of even the smallest cuts. And then there is Micah’s recording of a shrieker’s call to hunt. I shove the tape into an outer pocket: it may be useful again.
But that only takes twenty minutes, and I am still too restless for sleep. So I sit at my kitchen table and try to distract myself with a book. It doesn’t work. My thoughts keep turning to Phoebe and then to Jeannie. And from her to my wife. She has been gone twelve years, and all I have left of her is a single photograph, which I slip out of my pocket to help me remember her face.
She would have known what to do long before this. She would have had all the answers. I can see it in her eyes. She is smiling, in the middle of a laugh, looking at me instead of the photo booth camera we used to commemorate our engagement. Two women more deeply in love than I ever thought possible for me. So deeply that I can still feel her warmth on my face.
But she is gone, and it feels like forever. Like
I am alone in the world. I lost her. I lost Jeannie. Now Owen. Abigail. And so many others before them. I don’t even know most of their names.
But she would have known what to do. So I slip the photograph back into my pocket, keeping her close to our daughter, and pray that together they will help me find a way to bring Phoebe home.
PART TWO
LONG ROADS
AND OPEN SKIES
DAY THIRTEEN, 5:00 A.M.
Sleep is fitful. In my waking hours, reliving the memory of gunshots, I become fully aware that the Little Five is not the place I thought it was. Braithwaite’s compromises and Luther’s murders have made this irrevocably apparent, forcing me to recognize that I haven’t truly known the Little Five as my home since my daughter died.
Maybe that’s why I want Marilyn with us when we go on the fool’s errand to rescue Phoebe Weeks. For a time, she was a vestige of sanity and sensibility, and losing her made me even more needful of human connection. That need let me trust more than I should have, to fill the empty space that she left. I knew better, but I didn’t care.
I rise before dawn, unable to justify thrashing about in bed any longer. I stumble over all of the books that didn’t help me move quickly enough to reach an answer before its consequences came through the gate. Somewhere among my shelves there are maps of the state, probably close enough to current reality to be useful, and I spend the next ten minutes fumbling in the dark until I find them.
Once dressed, I hoist my pack and head down to the street, the roosters reminding me that I’ve already wasted half an hour. I want the Little Five to look different, to feel different, but it’s the same place it’s always been, until I reach its center. The refugees have set up a makeshift camp in the middle of the street, using tents and sheets and heavy boxes. Most of the people are still asleep, and those who are awake sit outside their temporary homes, warming themselves by barrel fires with empty looks in their eyes. Only a few of them acknowledge me when I pass.
At the hospital I almost expect to find Luther waiting for me with Marilyn, but I catch myself in enough time not to be overly shocked at the sight of her demolished body on the table. Marilyn is nearly finished wrapping her in a linen sheet. She covers what was once Luther’s face with the kind of clinical detachment that comes only from practice.
“Olsen isn’t doing well,” she says. “The wound’s deeply infected, and this morning the fever started. I hate leaving him like this.” For a moment, I’m afraid that Marilyn is going to back out, but after a silence she adds, “Inman’s doctors can treat him just as well as I could. Probably better.” Then she smiles as if to wash away her self-pity. “You’re going to need me more than he does. I’m going to finish up here. You should go in and talk to him.”
Olsen is laid out on a cot in one of the walk-in fridges that used to hold restaurant inventory. Without refrigerant, the room isn’t as cold as it would have been before the collapse, but the insulation makes it possible to keep the place cooler than the rest of the building. The man shivers under a pile of blankets, more from his own body’s struggle than from the temperature. His face is pale, and the bandages that cover his leg seep.
“Chief,” he says, his teeth chattering. “You have to take care of me. The doctors won’t do it until I’m gone. But you know better.”
“No, they do,” I say as neutrally as I can. “You could still pull through this.”
Olsen coughs out a laugh. “Maybe. I just don’t feel like I’m getting better.”
“No,” I admit, “and you don’t look like it, either. God, I’m so sorry this happened.” I don’t know what else to say. Everything I could say would only be a repetition of things I’ve said before. Ten years is a long time. The platitudes grow stale after a while, though offering them never gets easier.
“You know, I’m sure it’s just my imagination, but it feels like my head is getting lighter.” He laughs again. Blood appears on his teeth. “Of course, it’s not really. The slush is still the same weight, right?” He reaches out to grip my arm. “Leave me a gun. Please. You know they won’t do it themselves. And I can’t ask them to. But I don’t want to wait six hours. I don’t want to wait, knowing.”
I set my borrowed M1911A on the floor by the cot. The doctors from the enclave will probably remove it as soon as they see it, but I need Olsen to know that I care. With everything that’s been crumbling around us, it’s more important than ever.
We bury Banderas first, in an unmarked grave behind the north end townhomes, near the fences. Then Luther, with more respect, despite the revelations of her last day. Kloves lowers the makeshift casket himself, then piles the dirt alone, while a small crowd watches. The rhythm of the shovel sinking into the earth, then sliding across open space, feels like time ticking away. I remind myself that Phoebe is somewhere beyond the fences, afraid, and that Luther helped put her there. I give Luther as much time as my anger allows, then turn away to lead Marilyn and Kloves to the biodiesel farm where Vargas is waiting with the white Volvo.
I might have expected anger from him, or at the very least resentment, but his brief acknowledgement, “Chief,” is the extent of his dismay. Vargas opens the trunk hatch and lightly pounds the side of his fist against a pair of short barrels in the back. “You have ten gallons in each barrel. Station wagons aren’t the most efficient, but this, plus what’s in the tank, should get you wherever you need to go.”
Regina and the mayor come across the street as Barkov and I are packing the last of our supplies into the back of the Volvo. I make promises as they make their goodbyes and wish me luck. I tell them that they will have their daughter back soon; that this whole terrible affair will end, and our life in the Little Five will go back to the way it was.
“We must go before we lose the morning,” Barkov reminds me. He assists Kloves with the last knots tying our gear to the roof rack.
Vargas hands me the keys, whispering, “Bring her back,” and I am not sure if he means the car or the girl. Marilyn and Kloves settle into the back seat while Barkov rides to my right with weapons on his lap, at the ready. The sweepers at the tunnel pull the wall open, then close it behind us as I slip the car out of the shadows under the train tracks.
Back before the collapse, it wouldn’t have taken more than an hour and a half to reach the Athens-Clarke County line from the Little Five. In the first days, when the people of Atlanta started fleeing the greater metro area, they jammed the interstates and highways, turning the I-285 loop around Atlanta into a permanent parking lot. Interstate 20, which runs from the border with Alabama out to the sea, didn’t fare much better, and it took a surprisingly long time for the surviving communities to clear the abandoned cars. From what I’ve heard over the years, there are still large sections of state road that are impassable by anything larger than a motorcycle. Luckily, I-20 is traveled often enough that the greater majority of the obstacles have been moved, and trucks can cross old Georgia with relative ease, assuming there are no hordes blocking the path. Hollow-heads are attracted to the sound of engines.
I drive slowly past the abandoned Edgewood shopping center, with its smashed windows and overgrown sidewalks. Squatters tried to take back the shopping center a few years ago and discovered what we already knew: big windows are not defensible, and unless you’re willing to live in the parking lot, places like this are a death trap. Most of the food and supplies were raided, by us and by others, in the months following the collapse. Shopping centers are not the boon everyone once thought they were.
A dozen hollow-heads wander near an old mattress store, purposeless, it seems, after having gorged themselves on a deer. The blood streaks are still fresh on the sidewalk, and the animal’s mangled head is in the gutter. The hollow-heads notice the Volvo, turn toward us as we pass, and begin moving in our direction. They aren’t a threat, but I’m still glad to be past them as we go over the hill and head down toward the entrance to the interstate.
There is no familiar movemen
t on the road. Even after ten years, it is strange to experience the near-total abandonment of a city. Wildlife has reclaimed the streets, alongside the hollow-heads rummaging for food in the dark corners. A pack of dogs edges warily away from them, no doubt having learned the hard way that they are no longer on friendly terms. I almost laugh out loud realizing that I’ve used the left turn signal to get onto I-20. The click-click-click of the switch is a comfortable memory.
The interstate is a different environment. Abandoned cars have been pushed to the center of the highway and off the sides, leaving a wide path open for trucks. But even with the cleared path, it takes over an hour to reach the outskirts of Conyers and the end of the first leg of our journey. I pull off the highway at Exit 82, expecting to head across the overpass and then up Highway 138 to Monroe, but as I reach the top of the exit ramp I see a reflection flash at the intersection a moment before both front tires blow out. I brake hard and the Volvo skids to a halt, the front wheels grinding against the pavement.
Immediately Barkov hands me my SIG P229 and passes a shotgun back to Kloves as he pushes Marilyn’s head down against the back of my seat. I open my door slowly, sliding out behind it, keeping myself marginally protected by the metal. Most bullets will go right through a car door, but they’re too valuable to be wasted on shooting at a target that isn’t completely visible.
A glance behind me confirms what I suspected: a spike strip laid across the road, dragged out of position by the Volvo’s front tires.
Barkov mirrors me on the passenger’s side. I watch my side of the landscape, across the overpass, but I see no people, not even a hollow-head. Behind me, down the ramp to the interstate, the road is as abandoned as every other stretch. Minutes pass until Barkov and I agree that no one is waiting to ambush us: a standoff like this is pointless, and anyone waiting for us would have the clear upper hand, even after announcing their presence.
The Post Page 13
