by K. M. Fawkes
There was a rustling and Brad felt his body tense. Was Lee getting ready to stand? He realized that his heart was pounding against his ribs in pure fear. He had heard his father get angry over all kinds of things in his life. He had heard him yell and curse at both himself and his mother. But he had never experienced the sheer venom that had filled his father’s tone now.
“We used to worship the old God,” Lee said, his voice low now, though it still shook with rage. “He gave us everything we needed, but we wouldn’t take it. We didn’t want what we needed, you see. We only wanted what he wanted. So we slapped His hands away and we turned our faces from Him and then, when everything went to shit, we begged him to save us.”
Lee snorted. “Would you? If you were Him? I wouldn’t. And He doesn’t. Now He lets us suffer from the effects of pride and scientific discovery.” Lee had practically spat those last two words. “And we deserve it.”
Silence fell again and then Lee said, “Not all of us. But most. He’ll reward those of us who last through the revenge He has in store. He’ll reward us for being different. For being better.”
“That’s…good,” Brad said slowly when he sensed that his father was waiting for a reply.
Lee gave a quick laugh. “You always were difficult to impress, Bradley. But don’t worry. I’ll see to it that you’re around for your reward.”
“Thanks,” Brad said uncertainty. “I’d…I’d hate to miss out after everything that’s happened lately.”
“You won’t,” Lee said. “As long as you do what I say. I’m glad that I found you, son.”
“I’m glad, too,” he replied, his brow furrowed in the darkness.
A few minutes after that, Lee’s breaths deepened, telling Brad that he was finally asleep. Brad rolled over onto his back, staring sightlessly up at the tent ceiling where the emergency blankets would have reflected light if there had been any.
“My God,” he whispered in panicked confusion.
It wasn’t a prayer. What the hell was with all this newfound religion? Wanting to believe in a higher power in times of stress was one thing. He could accept that, and anyone who said that they didn’t need some comfort right about now was lying. Truthfully, Brad wasn’t exactly a nonbeliever himself…but this? This sounded like it could have come from the Major in one of his attempts to indoctrinate the people who had come to him for shelter and protection. It sounded dangerous, like the words of a heretic priest.
As Brad rolled over, burrowing deeper into the mummy bag he realized that it didn’t actually sound like Walker. It sounded much more like it had come straight from the Family themselves.
Despite the exhaustion that consumed his body, it took Brad a long time to drop off to sleep that night.
Chapter 8
“Welcome to Ashland,” Lee said as they crested a hill late the next afternoon. “I told you that we’d get here before dark if we didn’t stop for lunch.”
Brad found himself looking down at a frozen ghost town. In his present mood—hungry, tired, and still worried from their conversation last night—it wasn’t what he wanted to see. He felt his heart sink straight down to the soles of his boots. They’d come all this way for nothing.
To his surprise, Lee began to descend the hill.
“What are you doing?” Brad asked as he followed him down carefully. “There’s no one here, Lee.”
“Of course there is,” Lee snapped as he skidded to a stop and pointed to their left impatiently. “You don’t see the ash?”
Brad followed his father’s pointing finger with his eyes. A fine smear of ash lay on the white snow near one of the houses. There was no smoke rising from the chimney now, but there had been a fire there at some point recently. Brad felt like an idiot for not noticing, but nothing here looked like he’d expected it to. It was throwing him off of his game entirely.
“Don’t make too much noise,” Lee said, his eyes scanning the landscape for signs of movement or danger. There were no clear footsteps in the snow, but there were several indentations that could have been filled-in prints. It had snowed for a bit on their walk so it was possible that the prints were pretty fresh. They had no way to know if they’d be surrounded at any moment.
“I hadn’t planned on it,” Brad said.
“And stick with me closely,” Lee continued. “We don’t want to be seen if my buddy isn’t here.”
Brad would have been irritated by a demand like that twenty years ago. Now he only nodded and kept close. For one thing, it wasn’t worth arguing over. For another, his father had been much more normal in the light of day. Normal for Lee, anyway.
Brad might think that his father was a little nuts, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t trust him in moments like this. Maybe hearing the gruesome details of what had happened to Jamie had simply sent his father over the edge very briefly. It was understandable if it had. They’d been close and the boy’s death had been chilling and unfair.
They stayed close to the edge of the woods, moving mostly behind the houses scattered on the street. The snow drifts were high here, coming all the way up to Brad’s knees. This wasn’t at all what he had expected Garcia’s neighborhood to look like. He hadn’t expected to find the man in a neighborhood at all, to be honest. He had figured that they would find Garcia in a cabin very much like his father’s. This wasn’t the most tight-knit neighborhood he had ever seen, but it would be pretty damn hard to ignore the man making tanks and ammunition down the street.
“Here it is,” Lee said after a twenty-minute trudge, coming to a stop at a rundown looking place at the very edge of the town.
Brad craned his neck to look into the front windows. It wasn’t the best view, but from what he could see, the place looked completely abandoned to him. He didn’t comment on it. For all he knew there was a damn party going on inside and he had simply missed every single sign of it.
“Place is locked up tight,” Lee said with approval in his voice.
Brad was inclined to agree with the sense of the maneuver, but he was also cold and anxious not to waste time. Now that they had made it the fifty miles he had begrudged every step of, he wanted to get what they were there for and move on. They could get to what remained of his cabin in a little under an hour if they managed to get a vehicle.
Lee moved around to the side of the house and Brad followed him. What was his father looking for? Shouldn’t he be trying to get his friend’s attention?
As Lee scoured the windows, his eyes narrowed in concentration, Brad glanced around. Apparently, Garcia had a lot of land. There was a big building behind the house. He thought that he could see several trucks parked inside of it. There was another, smaller building to the side of it. So maybe that was where Garcia plied his trade.
That made the small house make a lot more sense. He wouldn’t have needed to store any of the tools of his craft inside it. Brad felt a little better about the man he was about to meet. Maybe this really had been a good idea.
“Aha,” Lee said suddenly, making Brad, who’d been lost in his own thoughts, jump slightly.
“What?” he asked in a whisper.
“Good old Garcia,” Lee said. “He remembered to leave out the welcome mat.”
Brad just stared. His father reached out and made a few deft twists with his wrist at one of the window casings. The window swung obligingly open.
“Come on in,” Lee said. “We’ll see where he’s hiding himself.”
Brad hoisted himself through the window after his father. This particular window had opened into a small kitchen. Lee sat down at the table and began to sharpen one of his knives, looking like he had been invited and had simply arrived ahead of time. In fact, everything they’d just walked into looked so damn normal that Brad simply stood in place for a bit, letting it sink in.
There were a few dirty dishes in the sink and a bucket of water standing half-full on the floor. Through the glass in the cabinet doors, Brad could see that the shelves were stocked to their edges with food in
glass canning jars. They were all labeled simply, black Sharpie on masking tape, but he couldn’t read them through the old glass.
Interior design hadn’t been Garcia’s aim, Brad was sure of it. However, this place was a pretty decent homage to the beauty of eclecticism and salvage. He doubted that the man had paid more than fifty bucks for anything he saw in the room, but it all looked good.
It functioned even better. Garcia had even found a few tricks that Lee had missed, like a chute in the wall to put garbage through so that it fell outside and a door cut into the floor that would keep food cold in the lower level of his house.
Brad glanced over at the table to see his father frowning in confused worry. “He should have heard us by now,” he said in a low voice.
“Should we go and look for him?” Brad asked.
Lee shook his head. “Garcia isn’t the type of man you want to sneak up on,” he said. “I was waiting for him to come to us. It’s safer that way. He’ll recognize me.”
Minutes ticked by though and there was no sound from the rest of the house. Not even a rustle or creak of floorboards. Brad looked at his father. Lee sighed.
“Okay,” he said. “I guess we’ll have to go look.”
Lee pushed the door that led into the living room open and stopped short. Brad nearly ran into him. For a second, his father didn’t move. Then he walked on into the room. Brad followed, his heart sinking at what they saw there.
The neatness didn’t continue in this room, but Brad wasn’t prepared to hold it against the man. The furniture was scattered all around the small living area. There were dark wooden tables on end in the corners and most of the stuffing had been ripped from the old leather couch. Glass from a lamp that had sat on one of the end tables was strewn over the floor, winking like diamonds as it caught the light of the setting sun. The ashes of the fire had been raked out of the fireplace, coating everything within range a dismal gray. Congealed blood and ash lay in small spatters near where the lamp had been broken.
“Why the hell was the place even locked up?” Brad demanded. He felt bad about whatever had happened to Garcia. He really did. Obviously, it hadn’t been good. But neither was realizing that he and his father had wasted two days for absolutely nothing. What if this was the thing that made him too late? What if this pointless, wasted side trip was the reason he didn’t save his family?
If the house had required special effort to get into, who knew how he had the ammo shed and garage locked up? Anna and the kids could be in the hands of the Family by now and it their lives could hang in the balance all because of this.
“What are you talking about?” Lee asked, turning to his son.
“What was the point of locking it up again after they killed this guy?” Brad asked angrily, kicking one of the tables out of his way and moving toward the door. “It wasn’t like he was going to come back for his stuff later!”
“Do you think that you might be able to take just one goddamn second to have a little bit of respect?” Lee hissed. “Jesus, Bradley, I’ve known Garcia for half of my life!”
Brad opened his mouth, but Lee turned away and walked down the corridor. He opened the door to the next room cautiously, but every other room was as neat as the kitchen had been. Brad began to move from anger to curiosity. None of what he was seeing really made much sense if he thought about it.
If the intruders didn’t want Garcia’s stuff, then what had they been doing there? Surely leaving him alive and in place would have benefited them much more. Unless the man had become a danger to whatever survivors remained here. And if he was a danger, surely they would consider Brad and Lee dangerous too.
Brad chewed his thumbnail as he looked around the small bedroom he had stepped into. There was always the possibility that Garcia had been killed or taken by people who were just passing through. Brad wasn’t sure that he wanted to hang around and take that gamble, though.
Lee came back up the hall, shaking his head. His face was drawn and furious. “He’s definitely not here,” his father said. “I guess we should hit the road; I’d hate to keep you from your precious family.”
“Look,” Brad said. The sneer in his father’s voice grated on his nerves, but the last thing he wanted to do was make Lee angry before the set out on their journey again. “I shouldn’t have said what I said, okay?”
“About Garcia’s death inconveniencing you?” Lee demanded. “Yeah, no shit.”
Brad bit down on the inside of his cheek as hard as he could to keep from saying anything that he would regret. “I’m sorry about Garcia. I really am,” he said. “But we both know that there’s no point in staying here. One way or the other, he’s gone. We can’t even be sure that it’s his blood out there,” he went on in realization. “Just because a fight happened, that doesn’t mean that he lost it, you know?”
Lee considered the words. “Yeah,” he said grudgingly. “I guess that’s true. We’ll check the garage and the workshop before we go. Maybe we can at least find a ride out of here in there.”
“Okay,” Brad said, stepping back to let Lee precede him down the hall and back to the window that they’d come in through.
“I just really thought that I’d find him here,” Lee said.
Brad looked at his father’s shoulders. They were slumped, all of Lee’s anger having been converted suddenly to grief. He put his hand on his father’s shoulder for a moment and Lee stopped. He looked around his old friend’s house with a deep sigh.
“Garcia’s father built this place,” Lee said. “He never would have left it. He said that he would die here. I guess he meant it.”
“Lee, we don’t know that he—”
Suddenly, Brad broke off. The sound had been slight, but he’d heard something. Lee seemed to catch it a bare second after his son. He put his hand on Brad’s arm, his fingers tightening as his lips drew back in a grimace. Brad suddenly realized what the sound meant. There were tires crunching over the snow outside the house. They were trapped like rats.
“Get to the kitchen,” Lee hissed.
Brad had only had time to back up a few feet when two men burst into the door. “Hands up!” one of them yelled. “Get down! Get on your knees right now!”
Brad considered running, but the men were carrying a lot of firepower. He wondered if it had come from Garcia’s shed. He dropped down, watching to make sure that Lee did the same. To his relief, his father was on his knees beside him. In Lee’s present frame of mind, Brad hadn’t been sure that he would consent to being ordered around.
Brad’s mind was already racing ahead, trying to gather clues about the men. Were they defending land that they had claimed or they simply passing through as well? In other words, would they have attacked anyone in this house or was this a little more personal? He couldn’t tell. In the end, it might not matter. In seconds, it could be their blood congealing on Garcia’s floor.
“Do you have any weapons?” one of the men asked Brad.
Brad started to shake his head and then rethought the move. Should he tell the truth or not? Either answer was likely to get him killed, really. If they knew that he was armed, they’d have a good reason to shoot him. If they thought that he was unarmed, they’d think he was easy pickings.
While he knelt there, paralyzed with indecision, his father moved swiftly. Lee reached behind him and yanked a gun out of a holster that he’d had looped around his ankle. He raised it in one smooth move and shot the man in front of him directly under the chin.
The man fell back, landing on the floorboards with a heavy thud that indicated complete lifelessness. That wasn’t surprising, considering the size of the exit wound in the top of his head. His gun clattered to the floor beside his corpse.
The man above Brad turned in shock, but he hadn’t reacted quite quickly enough. Lee shot twice more before he even got to his feet. One bullet went through the man’s hand and his gun dropped to the floor as well. His first yell of pain was cut short when the next bullet slammed into his knee. His
legs buckled and he fell to the floor. Brad scrambled back and away as the injured man writhed. His screams of agony made Brad shiver.
Lee stood and yanked the man up, drawing another yell of pain. Then he shoved him down onto the couch. The man was still screaming, so Lee slammed his hand over the man’s mouth so hard that he split his lip. Brad got shakily to his feet. When had Lee learned to move that quickly?
“Lee,” he began, his voice shaky and rough, but his father gestured impatiently for him to be quiet.
“Where are the guns?” he demanded. “Did you take them? Is this why you did this?”
The man didn’t answer. Brad wasn’t sure he could. The muffled cries of agony that came from behind his father’s hand were making Brad feel nauseous. Lee leaned forward, pressing his weight against the injured knee. A fresh wave of blood spilled from the wound.
“Where are the supplies?” he yelled. “Answer me, you son of a bitch!”
The man didn’t, and Lee’s eyes glinted in fury. Brad moved closer just as his father glanced down. He kept one hand over the man’s mouth, but he moved his other one to the gunshot wound. Then he stuck his finger into the bullet hole, pressing deep into the flesh. The man screamed again.
“Ready to answer me now?” Lee asked.
“I don’t know!” the man on the couch finally sobbed out. “Jesus, I don’t know! I don’t even know what you’re talking about!”
“Lee!” Brad shouted over the fresh shouts as his father dug deeper. He was shaking nearly as uncontrollably as the man on the couch. “Stop it! He said that he doesn’t know! What good is this doing?”
Lee stepped back, his shoulders heaving as he looked down at the man that he had just been torturing. Then he looked at Brad.
