The Post

by Kevin A. Muñoz

  “I’m sure you’re right. I know this isn’t going to be easy.”

  “It may be impossible,” Barkov says. “But we do it anyway.” He leads me through the door and into the cavernous garage behind the storefront. Because the darkness here is more complete, we move slowly and carefully until Barkov tells me to hold still while he searches for the tools he needs.

  It strikes me as odd that the Conyers enclave would have no vehicles. They have easy access to the biodiesel farm in the Little Five: a trip down the interstate would put them on our doorstep. Our Volvo can’t have been the first car they intercepted. Perhaps they have a collection hidden away somewhere, in various states of disrepair. Even so, I don’t recall hearing of any trade between the power company and the Conyers group. So if they are mobile, they must be getting their batteries and fuel from some other source. Or they simply don’t care and haven’t moved from this area since they took it over.

  Barkov interrupts my frustrated game of connect-the-dots with a light touch on the shoulder. “I have what I need. Come.” He leads me past the garage bay door to the smaller door at the far end of the garage. Here I can barely see my hands in front of my face, but Barkov seems to have no difficulty opening the door an inch and working his tools into the outside padlock. After less than a minute he announces success.

  Moonlight floods the space as he opens the door. Ahead of us is a small stretch of parking lot separated from the rest of the asphalt sprawl by a grass-covered median. Barkov moves right, and I move left so that we will be flanking the guard when we come back around to the front of the building. During the brief time that I am alone outside, my heart races. I feel the weight of solitude, the weight of cool air and darkness, of quiet. I feel like I’m the last person alive in the world. I scan the lot for signs of danger and notice two hollow-heads who weren’t here during the day. I hold my breath.

  The Christian tchotchke store we passed on the way from the interstate is barely visible, its large orange sign looming less prominently in the night’s moon-silvered obscurity. There, just below it, is the familiar white profile of the Volvo.

  I come to the last corner of the store and dare a peek at the guard. He has the air of an eager, unprofessional militia member: standing stock still, rifle gripped in both hands, completely exposed in all the ways that matter. Emulating something he may have seen in a movie or on television when he was a child. Only an idiot guards prisoners by facing away from the cell. There is too much tension in his body, which means he is more tired than he knows. Standing and waiting is more exhausting than most people suppose, and keeping still for so long will have prevented him from realizing how sluggish his muscles have become.

  I hear a hiss from the other side of the storefront: Barkov creating a diversion. As expected, the guard turns in that direction, lifting his rifle a bit too slowly. Taking advantage of the opportunity, I hurry the last few yards and throw my arm across his neck as Barkov reveals himself just a few feet away. Barkov disarms the guard immediately and the hapless fellow stops struggling almost as quickly. He whimpers as he pleads with me not to hurt him.

  “I saw hollow-heads,” I tell Barkov.

  “Then we will be quick, and we will be quiet.” Barkov puts his face uncomfortably close to the guard’s. “The nice lady doesn’t like a mess. When I ask you questions, you will answer them.”

  For effect, I put a little more pressure on the man’s neck. He makes an effort to nod. Barkov checks the confiscated rifle and the expression on his face confirms that he was right about its condition. “Where are the rest of your people?” he asks.

  The guard points weakly at the tchotchke chain store up the road. Barkov nods, then asks his next question. “How many of you are there?”

  “Twenty-three,” the man answers breathlessly.

  Barkov lifts the butt of the rifle and cracks it across the guard’s nose, which makes an unpleasant sound and begins to bleed. I ignore my distaste and cover the man’s mouth before he can make more noise. Even participating this much makes me queasy, but doing less won’t get us what we need, and objecting will only make it take longer. With every passing second, I expect to hear a shriek behind me.

  Barkov asks again, “How many of you are there? Not including the women you rape.”

  I smell urine as the guard trembles under my grasp. He whines his reply: fifteen. We learn more details in rapid succession. His replacement is coming at dawn. The group’s leader is named Orwell, and he lives with two captive women in the pizza parlor adjacent to the tchotchke store. The man who spoke to Barkov earlier is his right hand and an all-around thug, Frank Keadley. Then a stroke of luck: this guard is Keadley’s younger brother.

  “What have they done with our weapons?” Barkov asks, but the guard doesn’t know. He assumes they must be with Orwell, but his brother never tells him anything important.

  “Does Orwell have guards? Is he protected?”

  The man shakes his head tentatively. “I don’t think so. His—wives. That’s all. No one’s allowed to keep guns except my brother. I only have one because I’m watching you.”

  “And what about your brother? Where is he?”

  The guard gestures toward the tchotchke store again. “Inside. He’s inside.”

  It doesn’t take much longer for Barkov to be satisfied that he knows all he needs to know. I pull on the front doors as far as the chain will allow and speak to Kloves through the gap. “Keep Marilyn safe for me. Don’t come outside just yet. There are hollow-heads nearby.”

  “What’s going on?” Marilyn calls out from the middle of the room.

  “We’ll be back soon,” I call back in a loud whisper.

  “Sam—” she starts, but I let the door shut before she finishes. Right now, I don’t have the luxury of doubt.

  We lead the guard toward the stores, the rifle at the back of the young man’s head. I don’t feel sorry for him: he is part of a group that rapes, tortures, and murders women, and is exponentially more complicit in the human trafficking network than Braithwaite ever was. I don’t care that he’s a kid, barely twenty, too young to remember much of what it was like before the collapse. His moral world may have been shaped by his brother and the people he follows, but he could have said no.

  I can see the remnants of a cook fire outside the entrance to the department store. It’s a telling detail: the pizza parlor next door would have ovens with good ventilation, but it must be reserved for Orwell and his concubines. It is an expression of inefficient power, much like the badly preserved and undistributed rifles, and it means there’s not likely to be much backlash if we go after Orwell. So I hope, anyway.

  Barkov halts us twenty yards short of the department store’s doors. Unlike most of the other buildings nearby, this one has intact glass across the storefront. This gives the people within a clear view of any dangers coming across the parking lot. That might explain why there is no barricade protecting the enclave, but it means there must be some other defensive measure that I can’t see.

  “Where is the gun?” Barkov asks, keeping the guard between us and the storefront windows.

  “What gun?”

  I have the same question. Barkov gestures behind him. “The walls of these buildings are shot through. You have a machine gun emplacement. It can’t be on the roof because the parking lot is not full of holes. So it must be on the ground. Where is it?”

  “It’s—it’s inside,” the guard answers. “The boss keeps it there until we need it.”

  Even more inefficiency. They fight off hollow-heads, the occasional poacher or thief. They don’t have a bunker mentality against intelligent adversaries, and it must never have occurred to them that they might need one someday. They don’t bother with small arms upkeep because they don’t need it. They have a machine gun.

  “Lookouts?”

  The guard points to the roof, to the right of the store sign.

  “Call for your brother,” Barkov says in a
tone that offers no room for resistance.

  Immediately, the guard hollers up to the unseen men on the roof. “Get Frankie! Tell them it’s Ben. It’s important.”

  A few minutes later an oil lantern sways across the interior of the store, casting a spiderweb glow on the windows. The door opens, and the spokesman comes out with two of his associates flanking him. The first words out of Frankie’s mouth are, “Jesus fuck, Ben.” He is carrying my P229, wielding it like an action hero, with no control. He tries to keep it on Barkov, then on me, but his brother is too close to both of us, and he must know he doesn’t have the training to make the shot.

  Barkov is no more impressed than I am. “I am going to ask you some questions now. If you stop answering them, or if you lie, your brother’s face will be a stain on the ground.”

  “Jesus fuck!” repeats Frankie. “We’re going to kill every fucking one of you. Then we’ll find where you came from and kill them, too.”

  “How do you get your girls?” Barkov asks, shrugging off the threats.

  “Fuck you, you fucking Russian—!”

  Barkov doesn’t give Frankie the opportunity to finish his insult. Ben’s head explodes with a deafening crack, and the boy’s body flops forward like a rag doll. A mist of blood and brain and bone billows outward in front of us, and the choked scream from Frankie sounds as if it has been muffled by the foam of his brother’s head. Before the body has fully settled to the ground, Barkov is moving forward, stepping around the corpse, the rifle still poised to shoot. Frankie, bereft of sense, rushes forward, and Barkov swings the rifle stock around to catch the thug on the side of his head. He crumples a few feet from his brother, rolling in pain and anguish. Barkov puts a boot on Frankie’s neck and aims the rifle at the two remaining men.

  “Fetch your boss,” he says without a hint of anxiety. “In twenty-eight seconds I am going to crush his windpipe. Hurry.”

  He begins to count. As the two men rush away, I am unable to take my eyes off the remains of Ben’s brain on the blacktop, and I vomit wetly onto the pavement around his feet. As I spit out the sick, Barkov turns away as if to limit my humiliation. I silently thank him for the courtesy.

  “Take your gun,” he says, kicking it away from Frankie’s weakened grasp. “The boss will ask for us. He will give us answers.” When I don’t respond, he reaches down and picks up my P229. He forces it into my hand. “It had to be this way, Sam. This man was not going to talk. He felt protected. Orwell will not feel protected now. He will talk.”

  “You’re going to kill him, too,” I say, meaning Frankie. I may have all the anger necessary to do it myself, but I don’t think I have the will. Seeing Barkov’s ruthlessness up close again has made me less hungry for retribution.

  “You remember your CIA? The enhanced interrogation. The renditions. You know all this? You Americans were so indignant. Do you know what we called our intelligence agency in the Great Patriotic War? SMERSH. They say it meant ‘Death to Spies.’”

  As if to authorize Barkov’s response, the door to the pizza parlor opens. No one comes outside, and no one stands in the doorway.

  “We do this my way, yes? This is how we get back your girl. This is how we hurt them for what they did to my wife.” Without waiting for my acquiescence, Barkov reaches down and lifts Frankie by the collar, forcing him to stand and walk ahead of us. He sets the rifle on Frankie’s shoulder, lacing his free arm behind the man’s back and through his elbows so he can’t use his hands. I follow a pace or two behind with my SIG at our captive’s head.

  The pizza parlor’s lobby is lit with candles and a few old gas lanterns that haven’t been cleaned in years. The room is jaundiced, and the man seated at the booth at the far end is even worse. His mass presses into him, his girth too significant to be held easily between the back of his bench and the table. He is wearing a stained, worn bathrobe and a pair of slippers that are two sizes too small for his fat-laden feet.

  “Boss,” Frankie says in a whimper, but Orwell ignores him and snaps his fingers for Frankie’s two thugs to shut the door behind me.

  “What do you want?” Orwell asks. His voice is tight from the rolls of jelly pinching his neck. “Your car is outside. But you’re still here.”

  As we come closer, I notice that Orwell is clutching my Remington with one hand as it lies on the cracked red vinyl of the bench. His stubby fingers leave grease on the stock.

  “Where do you get your girls?” Barkov halts a few yards from the booth, and I turn to keep an eye on the two guards behind us. They both look rattled and confused, unlikely to cause trouble, but I’d rather be watching them than the interrogation.

  “You’ve got two already,” Orwell replies, and I hear his bulk shifting on the vinyl seat. “Don’t get greedy, boy.”

  “Take your hand off the rifle,” Barkov says. “You are smarter than your little men, and you know that I don’t care about killing you. This Frankie is not here as a bargaining chip. He is here as a shield.”

  The silence is heavy, like the moment after a thunderclap. I taste the bile in my mouth and throat. With my back to Barkov and Orwell, I can only guess at the fat man’s reaction until he replies with agitation, “His name is Ravana. Or that’s what they call him. Just ‘Ravana.’ We haven’t seen him. Only his people.”

  Another silence as Barkov waits for Orwell to continue. When he does, his throat is squeezed nearly shut with audible panic. “We get them in exchange for workers and cars. People pass through here all the time. We just—” I’d almost attribute his hesitation to shame, if I didn’t know better. “We just hand them over, and they give us the ones we want. They come from everywhere.”

  “That is not helpful,” Barkov says without any hint of irritation.

  “I don’t know anything else! I don’t know where Ravana is. When they leave they go northeast. That’s all I know. Northeast on the highway. Towards Monroe.”

  “And Clarke County,” I whisper.

  “They come once a month to pick up. They bring ours every six months.”

  “And did they come yesterday or the day before? Do you know a man named Randall?”

  “I know Randall,” Orwell says. “Him and his buddy. They’re enforcers. They only come if they have to. We haven’t seen ’em in a year. And they sure as hell weren’t here yesterday. What the fuck is this about? Who the fuck are you?”

  “Tell me about the bodies we found. How many women have you killed?”

  “Look,” Orwell says, and I can hear him squirming in his seat again. “It’s not like that.”

  “Sam,” Barkov says, his eyes remaining fixed on Orwell. “This is when you step outside.”

  “I should stay. You might—”

  “No,” he interrupts. “I will not. This is not for you.”

  As Orwell listens to the exchange his agitation grows. The vinyl underneath his bulk squeals its own objection.

  I shouldn’t leave. I know what Barkov is going to do. But these men only care about themselves, about whatever sadistic pleasure they can derive from another’s misery. They embody the filth that I’ve been wading through for days. I’ll learn to live with the guilt of scraping them off my boot.

  So I leave the interrogation to Barkov and move to the front of the store. A small crowd of onlookers has amassed in the parking lot, keeping a superstitious distance but clearly wanting to know what is happening within. Frankie’s thug friends are torn between their obligation to look out for the boss and their strong desire to get the hell out of the building. I gesture with my weapon, nudging them toward the door, and follow them outside.

  The crowd is behaving very differently from our first encounter. One of their number is dead and two are under threat, leaving the men to watch me with helpless confusion as I swing my sidearm across them. They are not carrying weapons.

  If Frankie’s brother—whose body has not been moved from its gore-painted spot on the pavement—was right with his count, then there ar
e two abducted women in Orwell’s headquarters and six more in the department store. The boss can protest all he wants about appearances not matching reality: I need to see for myself what they’ve been doing.

  I match Barkov’s cold voice and find it easier than I’d like. I point to the man showing the least shock and say, “Take me to the women you bought.” Sensing some hesitation, I gesture in the direction of Ben’s body. “He refused, too,” I say as nonchalantly as I can.

  My chosen guide accepts the lie eagerly and separates from the crowd, leading me to the department store doors. I keep him a few paces ahead of me and glance behind me every few seconds to make sure we’re not being followed. I steal a glance at the Volvo as we pass and note with some annoyance that our supplies have largely been removed.

  The interior of the store is darker than Orwell’s hovel. There is an equal number of candles and lanterns, but they are illuminating a space at least four times larger. Most of the aisles and displays must have been dismantled years ago to make way for a ramshackle, largely public living area. There are cots and bare mattresses set against the side walls and an eclectic array of chairs, sofas, and futons in the center. Storage lockers that may have come from a faux upscale import store are stuffed full of equipment and discarded knickknacks, while the more useful junk is laid out on the few shelves that the inhabitants decided to keep. I recognize most of our things stacked in a pile to one side, not yet sorted through.

  In spite of my anger at what’s been going on here, I can’t help but pity these men for living in near squalor. I want to ask them why they never thought to move to nearby houses. Part of the answer may be what I see shrouded in shadow at the far end of the store: a rusted out technical with a creatively secured Browning .50 caliber M2A1 machine gun in pristine condition, looking much like it must have done when it was built back in the early 2010s. Boxes of ammunition are stacked in the corner nearby.

  My guide stops at the stockroom door to the left of the improvised gunwagon. “Through there,” he says.