Five Suns Saga II

by Jim Heskett

  Since the pathway to the mansion was steep, Victor waved a hand at Norman and the assistant grabbed the back handles of the wheelchair, then pushed him up the cobblestone-laden slope. He jittered and vibrated while crossing the uneven terrain.

  “I understand the plants in your sunroom died,” Norman said. “The head caretaker wanted me to pass along his regrets.”

  Victor waved a hand. “It’s no matter. We can get new plants. I’m more concerned about the cargo and ensuring that it is safely transported into the basement, after the great risk we endured to acquire it.”

  “Of course, Leader,” Norman said.

  Near the front of the house, Victor sighed at the steps that his wheelchair could not cross. He nodded to Norman, who lifted him from the chair and carried him to the front door.

  Inside, Victor felt the immediate rush of relief that comes with the familiar. The mansion no longer housed the same number of vibrant worshippers it once had, but there should still be a dozen or so to welcome him home. He smiled up at the grand chandelier that hung in the foyer.

  Norman helped Victor into the chair and clasped his hands in front of his chest, awaiting further instructions.

  “We are weak now, Norman,” Victor said. “Weak out there in the world, and even more so in this house.”

  Norman made a few different faces, appearing to search for something uplifting to say. After a few uncomfortable seconds of this, Norman settled on silence, so Victor waved a dismissive hand.

  “Do you require anything else?” Norman said.

  Victor shook his head. “Round up your brothers and sisters outside and help oversee the transfer of the cargo, please.”

  ***

  Later that evening, Victor gathered everyone in the drawing room. Four caretakers who’d been left at the house, nine initiate residents, and the twenty members who’d traveled with him.

  While they took their seats on the couches and at spots on the floor, Victor gazed at the portrait of the mistress on the wall. She’d been known as Beth Fortner to most, advisor to Senator Edward LaVey, the man who took most of the blame for the collapse of the world. And while she’d died at the hands of a common thug parading as a judge, her plan to purify the world would never be extinguished.

  “Friends,” Victor said, rolling his wheelchair next to the fireplace and adopting the scowl they’d come to associate with him. “We are too few in this house.”

  Several heads nodded around the room. Norman took up a spot next to Victor and whipped out a notebook and pencil. Victor had never commanded Norman to act as scribe, but he seemed to enjoy it, so Victor never told him otherwise.

  “But,” Victor said, “we are many outside of this house. Does anyone know how many of us there are?”

  “A million,” said one initiate, a young man with curly black hair and no visible burn marks.

  Victor nodded, although he knew they had nowhere close to that number. Forty thousand had invaded New York, and he suspected that was the bulk of those he could call followers or members. And after New York, when they’d dispersed, there was no way to know if that number had grown through recruiting, or dwindled due to apathy.

  “The satellite network has stopped working. We have lost communication with your brothers and sisters.”

  Several of the followers mumbled and looked around at each other to know how to respond. Norman gave a deliberate throat-clearing to stop the rumbling and refocus their attention.

  “We can get them back,” Victor said once they’d all quieted again. “We must reach the twos and threes of us who are alone among the wolves and bring them back so they can be stronger here, with us. So we can finally realize the mistress’ dream and cleanse the whole of this sick country.”

  “How do we do that?” said the curly-haired initiate. Victor smiled at the young man. Initiates were not supposed to talk so openly without an invitation, but Victor assumed the young man hadn’t had the proper instruction, given their small numbers. At first, he decided to let it slide, then changed his mind. The young man would be used as a teaching lesson for the rest, despite their lack of initiates.

  “That is an excellent question,” Victor said. “Some of it is already in motion. We are trying to fix the satellite network. But, we are also going to leave messages for our people to bring them home. Bold, large messages they will not miss. Also, we have teams working south and west to gain new resources and bases for us.”

  A murmur of excitement went around the room. Victor knew he had to do no selling because the flock would love any plan he put forth. Speak with conviction, and let their beliefs do the rest.

  “And now,” he said, pointing at the curly-haired initiate, “we should celebrate our plan.”

  The initiate stood up as Victor beckoned him forward. Victor drew a knife with an ornately decorated hilt from beside the fireplace. “Will you be our celebration?” he asked the initiate.

  He saw fear in the boy’s eyes, but the initiate nodded willingly. He leaned forward and bared his unburned wrists as Victor provided for his flock.

  6

  With the blessing (or more accurately, indifference) of the camp leadership, Isabelle and her three companions left Fort Lee to travel north. They would get supplies, try to track Infinity movements, and report back in a few days.

  Hopefully, they could do all this before the Infinity invaded Fort Lee. Without a definitive timeframe, they could only guess how much time they had to safely return. A wrong assumption would mean failure.

  They rode in one car, and Dave had talked Alias into letting them have the camp’s sole SUV, a junky old thing on its last legs. They’d stacked enough full gas cans in the trunk to get them to Philadelphia, but they didn’t have enough for the trip home. That would be a worry for later. It had been a miracle that they’d been given any gas at all, for what was deemed a frivolous mission.

  Dave drove and Isabelle sat shotgun. Zach and Sutter sat in the back. I-95 was relatively clear of dead vehicles and other random obstructions, so they made good time heading up toward Richmond.

  Twenty minutes into the journey, Sutter leaned forward. “If things go bad in Philly for some reason, we have an ace up our sleeve.”

  “What’s that?” Isabelle said.

  Sutter jabbed Zach in the arm.

  “I know where the Infinity home base is,” Zach said. “Or headquarters, or whatever you want to call it.”

  “How in the world do you know that?” Isabelle said.

  Zach looked pleased with himself. “I’ve been there. Long time ago.” Then, he paused, and his face fell a little. “Right before the meteor bulshit, actually. I got invited to some house party in Red Bank, but I had no idea who they were.”

  “House party?” Dave said.

  “That’s what they said it was,” Zach said, “drinks and weed and girls and whatever else I wanted. But it was actually an initiation test for their group. Up until then, I could honestly say I’d never seen anything that weird.”

  Isabelle’s ears perked up. She turned in her seat to face Zach fully. There had been so many stories about Infinity initiations, but no one from outside their cult had ever seen one, as far as she knew. “You saw an initiation happen?”

  Zach ran a hand through his hair. “Not really. I mean, they wanted me to join them because, I guess, my parents had been members a long time ago. I didn’t know anything about it. But they put me in some room and tried to get me to kill a girl and drink her blood.”

  Dave winced as Isabelle checked Sutter for verification. Sutter and Zach knew each other, so if the guy was telling the truth, Sutter might know. He nodded.

  Isabelle was impressed. In the short time she’d known him, she hadn’t seen Zach contribute much of anything useful to the camp. But this kind of inside knowledge of the Infinity could give them a powerful advantage.

  “What happened to the girl?” she said.

  Zach sat back and slid on a pair of scratched sunglasses. “I married her.” He stared
out the window, apparently done talking. The fact that Zach had come to camp without a woman probably explained why.

  “I was thinking,” Dave said, “when we get close to Annandale, I’ll take 495 so we swing around DC instead of through it. DC will only slow us down.”

  The look of navigational excitement on Dave’s face warmed Isabelle’s heart a little. Although he’d never admit it, she thought he missed driving a truck sometimes.

  “Actually,” Sutter said, “I was hoping we could still go through DC. I have some unfinished business there.”

  “What business could you possibly have in DC?” Dave said.

  “Ian Rappaport,” Sutter said.

  Zach took off his sunglasses. “Rappaport. Why does that name sound familiar?”

  “He was Vice President when the world collapsed,” Isabelle said.

  Dave glanced over at Isabelle. “Rappaport was the one that CIA guy was talking about, right? When we met the other man in the Metro last year and Logan took off with him?”

  Isabelle nodded. “Sutter, what do you want with some washed-up politician?”

  “I’ve been looking for him off and on for the last few months. I met him, a long time ago. Worked in his security detail when he visited New York once.”

  “So?” she said.

  “I think it’s time he got back into politics,” Sutter said.

  Isabelle laughed. “I hate to break it to you, but that guy’s a ghost. He hired this retired CIA agent to go out west and kill Edward LaVey so Rappaport could retake power, but nothing came of it. LaVey is dead, Chalmers is dead, and Rappaport is still cowering in a bunker somewhere. Besides, I thought we didn’t have time for side missions.”

  Sutter sighed. “It’s important.”

  “Okay,” she said, “and what makes you think you can force him to snap out of it?”

  Sutter stayed quiet for a few seconds as Dave slowed to navigate through an obstacle course of car collision debris.

  “Because someone has to,” Sutter said.

  ***

  Sutter nudged Zach awake when they pulled the car to a stop on Pennsylvania Avenue. To their right, the husk of the White House spread out on the lawn around the grounds. The building was like the carcass of an animal picked clean by salivating wolves and buzzards. A few of the pillars still stood, but the rest was rubble.

  “Holy shit,” Zach said. “Is that…?”

  Isabelle cleared her throat as she took off her seat belt. “Kind of sobering, isn’t it?”

  “Why did we stop here?” Sutter asked Dave.

  Dave pointed at a mostly intact building across the street. “That’s the Hay-Adams Hotel. There’s a bar inside there where important people sometimes hang out.”

  “It’s not much of a bar anymore,” Isabelle said. “But it’s where we had to go meet the guy who hired us on behalf of Rappaport last year. If you’re going to find him, that’s the place to start.”

  Sutter reached under the seat and withdrew his pistol, then checked the clip. “Good job, guys. I never would have known about this place.”

  “Let’s go,” Zach said.

  Dave cleared his throat. “Wait a second. Take a look at the building. Fourth floor up, second from the left.”

  Sutter leaned close to the car window, and after squinting, he could make out a face behind the building’s tinted glass.

  “That’s a sniper,” Dave said. “I can see one also three windows over and one floor up.”

  “Then why the hell are we here?” Zach said.

  “That’s a pretty good sign that the people Sutter’s looking for are inside,” Isabelle said. “And it also means we shouldn’t all go in. If we walk up there like a gang, they’ll shoot first and forget about asking the questions.”

  Sutter unbuckled his seat belt. “I’ll go. I’ll be just a few minutes.”

  Isabelle, who Sutter seemed to think had nominated herself the group’s leader, shrugged her approval, so he left them there and crossed the street. Pistol in his waistband and an ache in his lower back from the car ride.

  He eyed the tall stone building, trying to check each of the windows for more snipers. He caught sight of one pivoting and pointing the barrel of his weapon at him.

  In New York, any building that was still standing and had unbroken windows became a sought-after commodity. They all came to be owned by someone or some group, and entering one without permission usually guaranteed a fight. Entering the wrong building at the wrong time could be a death sentence.

  What did all those Manhattan turf wars mean now? Nothing.

  He glanced back at the SUV one last time before opening the front door of the hotel. Inside, massive vaulted ceilings greeted him, with marble columns reaching down to marble floors. Back in the day, those floors would have been shiny. Now, not so much.

  He squinted to take in the minimal light. No bedrolls or empty food tins or puddles of candle wax anywhere to be seen. Someone took care of this place, but he hadn’t been greeted by gunshots. At least, not yet.

  If there were guards on this floor, they were hiding.

  Sutter strolled through the lobby, listening to his footfalls clack and reverberate off the ceiling. Voices, low and deliberate, came from down a hall. Then laughter; a woman’s voice.

  He kept his hand ready to snatch the pistol as he crept down the hallway. The sounds grew louder, and now he heard several women’s voices competing. When he rounded the corner, he got a look through the door at what must have been the hotel bar Dave had mentioned. Velvety red booths opposite dark wooden walls. Behind the counter, shelves where drinks used to sit. The beer taps, probably long since empty, still stuck up from the bar like popsicle sticks in a tray.

  And four women sitting at one of those booths in the back.

  Sutter pushed open the swinging door, and one of the women immediately jumped up, leveling a shotgun at him. The others hushed.

  “Who the hell are you?” asked the one with the shotgun, a ferociously tall woman with military short hair.

  He raised his hands in surrender. “I’m not here to cause any trouble. I’m looking for an individual, but not to do any harm. I just want to talk.”

  “Jeanie,” said a scrawny woman in the booth, “they’ve finally come to collect your back taxes.”

  They all laughed, even the one with the shotgun. Sutter noticed how clean and put-together they all seemed. They were wearing nice clothes, had copious amounts of jewelry, and carried purses. Sutter hadn’t seen that in years. Like some country-club-clique oasis in the middle of a broken and bruised city.

  The scrawny woman waved him forward. “What’s your name?”

  “Sutter.”

  “Let me guess,” said a woman with braided hair, “you used to be a cop.”

  “Is it that obvious?” he said.

  “Honey,” the braided woman said, “I can tell just by the way you’re standing. All y’all come off the same assembly line.”

  “Well, Sutter, who are you looking for?” said the scrawny woman.

  “Ian Rappaport,” he said, and they all grew silent. The gaunt woman, an elderly lady with a bowl cut and pearl earrings, pursed her lips and pushed air in and out of her nose.

  “Why are you looking for him?” the elderly woman said.

  “I met him once when I was a cop. I wanted to make him an offer.”

  The elderly lady bristled.

  “Can I put my hands down now?” he said.

  “No,” said the elderly lady. “I think you should go before something bad happens to you. Cop or not, you’re interrupting a private party and you don’t have any reason to be here.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but the tall one with the shotgun took a few steps toward him, so he backed out, hands still up. The woman kept advancing, finger on the trigger.

  She snarled at him like a bulldog, so he jogged out of the room and didn’t look back. Thought about those snipers on the upper floors, wondered if they had walkie-talkies and how quick
ly they could get down to this floor.

  Once he was back out in the hall, he broke into a run, his footfalls slipping across the dusty floor. He burst through the front door and trotted toward the car. Isabelle saw him and jumped out, then leaned across the hood with her gun pointed at the hotel.

  He waved her back into the car, spun to make sure none of the snipers in the windows were about to shoot, then slid in the back seat as Dave started it up.

  “Didn’t go so well?” Zach said.

  “No,” Sutter said. “No, it didn’t.”

  ***

  That night, they camped inside the Lincoln Memorial, right at the base of the statue. Someone had removed Lincoln’s head and replaced it with a basketball, but the rest of the building was in good shape. Bit of graffiti here and there; the usual Infinity propaganda about the mistress and five suns of lies and that kind of thing. All those ominous warnings which used to seem so scary had blunted to background noise.

  They agreed to sleep in shifts because, even though no one had bothered them for the first few hours they’d been in DC, that could change at a moment’s notice.

  Sutter took the first watch while the other three zipped up their sleeping bags. He sat quietly as the moonlight bounced off the reflecting pool and he thought back to a class trip he’d taken here in the eighth grade. The silly notions he’d had of being president someday. Law school, then city council, then governor of New York, then eventually president. It had been his destiny, or at least that’s what fourteen-year-old Sutter had believed.

  Just as he was drifting off to sleep, footsteps echoed near the memorial. He reached out and smacked the closest sleeping bag, which was Dave’s. Then he whistled at the others.

  Sutter raised his gun as two figures came into view: the elderly lady with the pearls and the tall buzzcut woman from the hotel bar.

  Isabelle flicked off her 9mm’s safety. “That’s close enough. We don’t have anything worth taking.”