The Post

by Kevin A. Muñoz

  “That was your doing,” I tell her. “You know that.”

  She shakes her head gently, smiling with the slightest condescension. “No, Sam, I don’t think that’s true. I hope it’s not. You’ll do all right, even without me. You’ll take Phoebe home, and you’ll get a hero’s welcome. And you’ll tell the story of what we did. And you’ll remember me. And then you’ll move on, just like before. You’ll go on. You’re a survivor. We all are, now. But you always were. This world didn’t make you. So I know you’ll be all right.”

  I have nothing to say. Six hours is not enough time and far too long. It’s made harder by Marilyn’s readiness. It’s not defeat, or resignation, that I see in her eyes. It’s completeness. I’ve never been as strong as that.

  But she’s always been right about me, so I must trust her.

  “You should do it now.” She smiles at me again, this time with nothing but genuine affection and regret. “Before it starts to get difficult for me.”

  “I don’t think I can.”

  “You—had a daughter, right?” She struggles for a moment to remember. “You’ve had to do this before.”

  “I had you then. To help me back from the ledge when it got too hard to bear.”

  She kisses me softly on the lips, her hand on my cheek. “You were never going to fall, Sam. I knew that when we met. That’s why you had me.”

  Phoebe stands on the road alone while I bury Marilyn in soft ground beneath a sycamore tree. By the time I return to her, my tears are mixed with sweat, and I have regained myself enough to take the girl’s hand for the last miles of our journey home. I let Phoebe see my grief. Marilyn deserved as much. To be remembered in the open, with all the pain on the surface for the world to see. I never gave that to Jeannie.

  But Marilyn was right again. I am going to survive this. I have to: there is work to finish. Phoebe’s ordeal must be avenged. Owen and Abigail deserve justice. And after, when the walls have been knocked down on the Little Five’s house of cards, I will have to find a new way forward. There is too much filth in the fields for me to stay. And even if I cut off the head of Ravana, there will be others, and many more. An end to the horror won’t come with an end to its architect.

  As we come into view of the wall under the bridge, a shout goes up from the top of it, and more shouts beyond, relaying the news of our return. After a few minutes of scrambling on the other side, the door is opened, and men and women of the sweep team tumble out, rushing to us, cheering. The exuberance becomes muted when they realize that I am alone with Phoebe.

  Regina hugs her daughter, and Phoebe cries. I linger for a moment. I need to see one last time that there is still love and hope in the Little Five.

  The crowd that forms around us wants to know what happened, how my friends met their fates, and where I found Phoebe. They believe they do, anyway. I don’t answer because they will know soon enough, and their lives, too, will change. Without the materials Ravana’s network provided, the Little Five will go back to being a small speck on a much bigger map, with powers and principalities surrounding it, never to be the center of attention again.

  But that’s as it should be. Without knowing, we made too many compromises. Compromises that allowed all of this to happen and gave us the luxury of turning away from questions we should have asked. We were better than Clarke County, but not enough.

  Pritchard finds me in the crowd. He looks tired and relieved to be able to hand the reins back over to me. I don’t have the heart to tell him the truth of things, so I let him brief me on what has been happening in the Little Five since I left. Braithwaite and Abraham are gone: they were given a choice between imprisonment and exile, and they both chose exile.

  “The mayor authorized that?” I ask as we maneuver through the throng toward the station. “Whose idea was it?”

  “It came from the rest of the power company, I think. You know how they are. They look after their own. It’s going to be rough without those two. Vargas is taking it hard. There’s been talk that he might leave us, too.”

  I let Pritchard go on into gossip, but I’m not listening. I don’t care about Vargas and what the power company feels or wants. My thoughts are moving forward, toward a future different from the one the Little Five deserves.

  Even so, there are still a few loose ends I need to address. “Where are the women Marilyn brought here?” I ask as we reach the station, interrupting Pritchard’s rambled updates.

  “Oh boy,” he replies, one hand on the door, lingering. “Echevarria looked them over. Some of them were—well. You know, Chief. And we did the best we could. But all the refugees from Inman Park were here, and we were trying to clean that area out for them, so some things slipped through the cracks. A couple of the girls got out past the fences, and we have to assume they didn’t make it. One of them killed herself. The others are still here, but I don’t know, Chief. It doesn’t look good for them. It’s like they’re broken.”

  I take a moment to accept what he’s telling me. I didn’t have reason to think there would be happy endings for anyone in this mess, but I wanted to hope.

  “Where’s the mayor?”

  Pritchard wants to follow me into the station, but I stay on the street. “I don’t know,” he says with a furrowed brow. “Probably gone to see Phoebe. You all right, Chief?”

  “I’m fine,” I say with a manufactured smile. “Find him for me. Let him know I’ll meet him at his office. There’s something he and I need to discuss privately. Then come find me in an hour.”

  “Sure,” Pritch agrees, hesitant. Then, as if realizing it only now, he adds, “I’m sorry about Augustus. And Dr. Trainor. I know you two—well. I know it’s a hard thing.”

  “Phoebe’s safe,” I tell him. “That’s what matters.”

  I cross the street and make my way north, avoiding the eyes of those few who haven’t yet heard the news of our return. The mayor’s office is open when I arrive but empty. I enter without hesitation, as I’ve done so many times before. I know this place well. The oak desk. The bookshelf stuffed with the academic works Weeks used in his former life as a professor. I remember looking at them with envious curiosity many times over the years.

  And I remember the pages of the book I saw in Athens.

  Norm Ithering called Ravana the “prodigal son.” That phrase, that name, broke open a floodgate that filled in all of the empty spaces in my sluggish brain. Ithering knew almost nothing about the one they call Ravana, but he knew that the man once had lived in Athens. It’s only possible to be a prodigal son if you’re returning to a place you’ve already been.

  The book pages that serve as the key for the numbers station codes should have been a stronger clue, but I wasn’t thinking along the proper lines. It was important, of course, that the name of the book was The Many Heads of Ravana. That must be how the traffickers came up with the name of their elusive, invisible leader: they took it from the title of the code book. They had no other choice because they had only part of the text.

  They didn’t have the title page or the cover. So they didn’t know the name of the man who wrote it. Under most circumstances there would be no reason to keep only a few pages of a book like that. The code didn’t require a specific kind of writing; it could have used key text from anywhere in that book. Tearing pages out of a whole text would be unnecessary work.

  But Ravana needed to remain hidden. Revealing the author’s name would have told too much.

  I find it on the shelf among the other treasures, unremarkable except for a painting of an Indian god on the cover. And the author’s name in bold yellow lettering below: Aloysius Hanover Weeks.

  The professor of Southeast Asian religions at the University of Georgia in Athens, turned mayor, and stepfather to Phoebe. I had been right about the reason Phoebe was abducted—to force me out of the Little Five, so that I could be killed in private to keep the secret he was afraid I would learn—but it hadn’t occurred to me to consider why
it was Phoebe, specifically. It hadn’t occurred to me that she was not selected at random. She isn’t the only child in the Little Five.

  But she had seen Owen’s map. The same map that Marilyn and I found in the elementary school distribution center. And Phoebe is a trusting girl, and though she has only known her stepfather for a few years, I’ve no doubt that she would share her experiences with the man. She must have told him what she saw, just as she told me.

  So she, too, had to be removed.

  I was played for a fool from the beginning. For years. Everything that the mayor helped to build has been on the backs of slaves. The edifice of his particular greed, with its deep basements hiding chained souls. Hiding its very architect. I doubt Braithwaite and Abraham and Luther ever learned the identity of the person who pulled their strings, taking orders by proxy. But I was kept in the dark entirely. Weeks, like Marilyn, knew that I would not have sacrificed others’ lives for my own comfort.

  When Mayor Weeks finally enters his office, finding me here by the wall of books with my P229 level with his chest, he already knows why I’ve come. I can see it on his face: it twists through a series of expressions ranging from dismay to fear to preparation.

  Not for death, surely. For persuasion. He must be very good at it, to have built an empire in the crevices of the world. Even his reputation as a man of few words is probably a construction, a lie that holds a secret in its quiet fingers.

  “You don’t have to do this,” he says, taking a step toward me. His voice is the same velvet it always has been. What once soothed now only disgusts me.

  “I do,” I reply.

  “Think of Phoebe,” he says.

  “You forget, Weeks, I was a mother once. And like Phoebe is to you, Jeannie was not blood of my blood, but blood of my heart.” If I had any second thoughts before, they are certainly gone now. This is for the women I have lost and the ones that he has destroyed. “I would have died in her place, if there had been a way. I would have gone to my grave with gladness knowing that I had kept that pain from her. I never got the chance, and I have to live with that. But you! You chose this. I did not give birth, but I was a mother just the same. And you should have been a father.”

  “Sometimes we have to make hard choices,” Weeks says.

  I steady my weapon with both hands. To make sure I don’t miss. “You never even tried. And the thing is, I don’t care why. I’m not interested in what made you the bastard you are or how you’ve hidden it for so long under the noses of people who loved you.”

  “You don’t know what’s at stake. This is bigger than one little girl.”

  “You don’t get to tell me what the stakes are. I remember them every day. I put the last ounce of myself into this job because I know what I’ve lost. There is nothing bigger than one little girl!”

  I squeeze the trigger, and blood blooms on Weeks’s shirt. He staggers back into his doorway, grasping at it for balance. But he can’t breathe, and that brings panic and vertigo. He stumbles to his knees.

  “Think of Phoebe,” I tell him and put the next bullet in his head.

  Holstering the gun, I step over the body, leaving through the bright glass doors of the Carter Center.

  I cross the farmland, pass the chicken coops, and open the front door to my home, marveling for maybe the first time that I’ve never locked it and never had the need. The Little Five was safe.

  I retrieve my Coast Guard Foul Weather Parka from the closet. I open my pack and sort through the contents, replacing and refilling it with what I will need for a longer journey. I fill another backpack as well, with the books I’ve worn out most. At first the selection is difficult, but once I accept the process and acknowledge that even my library was always, inevitably, transient, it becomes a mere calculation. I strap the G36 to the heavier pack and hoist them both onto my back.

  And then I sit down.

  Still on the bedside table is a framed Polaroid of Jeannie, almost identical to the one that I keep in my pocket. Her third birthday, one of many good days that I was able to give her. But not enough of them. Not nearly enough. In the end, I failed at the one thing that mattered more than all the others.

  Marilyn tried—she tried so very hard—to show me a way to live beyond the pain of Jeannie’s passing. But she had never been a mother. She knew loss. She knew the frustration and anguish of a patient dying on her table. But she had never lost a daughter. She never had to make the most painful decision a mother can make.

  And yet she was there, with me. And I was there, with her, when it was time for her to go. And I was there with Phoebe in that dark room as the hounds bayed at the door.

  Jeannie died in my arms. Marilyn, too.

  But Phoebe made it home.

  I didn’t understand why until now. But of course, Marilyn did. She must have. She wouldn’t have striven so hard and so long if she hadn’t. She didn’t want me to stop caring about the Little Five just to be with her. She wanted me to understand why I cared. She wanted me to remember what it was like to be Jeannie’s mother. She wanted me to be that, again.

  For the Little Five.

  Not blood of my blood, but blood of my heart.

  Coming into this room I believed I was finally moving on, leaving behind a place where I never should have stayed. I was ready to cut the strings of my life here and forget all about the Little Five. But I can’t do that. I can’t forget her any more than I can forget Jeannie. I won’t betray these people just so I can stop hurting.

  I would have died in her place, if there had been a way.

  I leave Jeannie’s photograph on the table. She will be waiting for me when I return.

  I lock the front door just as Pritch arrives. I hand him the key. “Keep this safe.”

  “You’re not staying,” he says.

  “I can’t. Not yet.”

  “Because of what I found at the mayor’s office,” he says as we walk south.

  “Yes.”

  “Was it for the reason I think it was?”

  “It was.”

  “You don’t have to leave, Chief. They’ll understand. The Little Five is your home.”

  “You’ll take good care of her while I’m gone,” I tell him.

  Pritch stops me before I step through the tunnel door. “Thank you,” he says. “For staying. All those years ago. You’re the reason the Little Five’s been safe.”

  “Not yet,” I tell him. “But soon.”

  For Ravana is a god of many heads, and the beast is not yet ended. Randall is still out there, itching for a rematch, still following his master’s last order. Slave ships still sail from the Port of Savannah. And I’m sure at least some of Ithering’s people still live. They will be wanting their piece of the empire when the network learns that Ravana is gone.

  So there is still much left to be done. More stupid heroics.

  But I think that’s how Marilyn wanted it, after all.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have come about without Shannon T. Stewart. His multi-faceted support and trust made the writing process possible. Bernadette Baker-Baughman at Victoria Sanders and Associates has been an unflagging and zealous shepherd of The Post from the beginning. By her excellent analysis and advice, Gretchen Stelter at Cogitate Studios illuminated the right roads to take. Lia Ottaviano and Jaime Levine at Diversion Books discovered solutions to difficult problems and shined my work far brighter than I could have done on my own. My partner, Rebekah Turk, has been a wonder of support and confidence in all the dark places along the way. I am grateful to be able to thank each and every person for their crucial roles in getting The Post in front of you.

  But most of all I wish to thank Reader One, Nancy K. Muñoz, who has a closet full of everything I’ve written since I was a child. She has been a constant and indispensable advisor for over forty years.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kevin A. Muñoz earned his Ph.D. in New Testament studies at Emory U
niversity in Atlanta, Georgia. He has been a game designer, language instructor, and adjunct professor, and now is following the path of his father as a published novelist. The Post is the first of many.