“To West Virginia?”
“To West Virginia. We leave at first light.”
12
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just send you to Harve and his boys for a little bit of their particular brand of fun, Mr. Standing. Harve has been champing at the bit since your aborted escape to have at you, and nothing I’ve heard so far minds me to stand against him having his way with you.”
Trace Parker leaned back on the red velvet chaise longue and sipped at his margarita, which a beautiful woman he’d called Lacy had been placing in his hand as Jackdaw and Steve had brought Josh into one of the reception rooms of the mansion.
The room had been sumptuous once, like the rest of the mansion, but now had a decayed glory—lots of cobwebby brocades and moldings, dusty mirrors reflecting the yellow candlelight, and furniture that had seen not just better days, but better centuries. There was a distinct smell of damp in the room, too, which all but made Josh wrinkle his nose.
Lacy was anything but matched to the faded decrepitude of the room, though. She was tall, thin, and looked to be made from cut glass. All her angles were as sharp as hell, and her near-black eyes seemed to slice Josh into chunks as Jackdaw kicked his calves from behind and made him fall to his knees. Lacy was in a tight black dress with a savagely V’d neckline, holding a thick pearl necklace over mountainous cleavage.
She’d arranged herself on the end of the chaise lounge like a complicated and beautiful piece of origami, and was proceeding to rub Trace’s feet through his argyle-patterned socks. Trace had yet again changed his clothes and dressed like a young buck from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel—all cravat and bright yellow waistcoat taut over his ample stomach, and a plaid lounge jacket above plus fours. He was taking his role as lord of this particular manor to extremes.
“You’ll do what you want to do, Parker, but there’s things you need to know about Savannah. Things that have implications for all of us. For all the country.”
“I doubt that, Mr. Standing, I doubt that very much indeed. I only agreed to this meeting to hear what lame excuse you might have for coming back with nothing to show for your endeavors, other than the deaths of several of my hostages.”
Josh had been hurried back from Thunderbolt to Parkopolis by Jackdaw, along with the other three men who’d survived the battle in the burning hardware store. The other survivors had told a story of scattering when they and Barney had been attacked. They’d run for the front of the store and made it out some time before Josh, then run all the way back to Thunderbolt empty-handed to plead with Trace’s men not to harm their children in retaliation for the failed mission.
They were blaming Barney completely for the screw-up, Jackdaw had told Josh. One of them saying over and over that they should have listened to Josh.
That was no real consolation to the ex-cop, however. Gerry and Ralph were still dead, and the poor wretches still in Savannah—whatever proportion of the population that represented—were being tortured inside their own bodies. It was a horror story that washed through him with unholy dread. As if things weren’t already bad enough. Josh had spent the journey imploring Jackdaw to let him see Trace, to tell him what he had discovered in Savannah. He hadn’t known if Trace would even see him, or if he would be amenable to changing course, but Josh was going to try anyway.
While he’d waited outside under guard, Jackdaw had gone into the mansion to seek permission for the audience. He’d returned an hour later and taken Josh inside, telling him, “You make this good or this will reflect bad on me, Standing; and if it reflects bad on me, you’re gonna suffer.”
Josh knew he had rightly identified Jackdaw, the youngest of Harve’s men, as the one who would listen to reason and maybe get him in to see Trace. If it had been Steve he’d spoken to, he didn’t think his argument would have gotten through the tough exterior, and if it had been Harve who’d brought him back from Thunderbolt, it would have been an impossible ask—and probably gotten him a beating for his troubles. That it had been Jackdaw who’d met him at the roadblock was fortuitous, and he’d worked on the young man all the way back to Parkopolis.
But now that he was here in the presence of Trace Parker, all bets were off. It could go either way, and the conversation seemed more than likely to go down in flames.
“My problem is that I’m too lenient and too compassionate,” Trace said, offering his other foot to Lacy to rub. “You failed in your mission. You came back empty-handed, and instead of having your head put up on a pike after I’ve roasted a couple of children in the cage as a warning to the others, here I am actually listening to you. When I sat in meetings—in a world that seems so desperately long ago—underlings would come to me with their ideas for advertising campaigns that I knew right from the first syllable would be a waste of my very valuable time. But I nodded, listened, and made these underlings feel like they were contributing to the company I had busted my backside to make ascend to greatness. You remember the Chucky Bar campaign, Mr. Standing? That was one of mine.”
“I… no…”
Trace ignored Josh’s negative and plowed on, his eyes sparkling with happy memories. And then, astonishingly… he sang. “Chucky Bar! Chucky Bar! Your Best Friend Near or Far. Chucky Bar! Chucky Bar! The Best, Best Bar to Eat in Your Car!”
Josh had no idea how he was supposed to respond, and so he didn’t.
“The genius of the Chucky Bar, of course, is that the blend of chocolate they’d created was deemed too hard on the tooth, too difficult to be successful, and then we at Parker-Leeming-Flambard—well, me specifically—came up with the idea of a chocolate bar you could leave in your glove box that wouldn’t become all melty and horrid if it had been in there for a while. You must remember the commercial, Mr. Standing. The cartoon car running around the cartoon sun trying to get its sunlight fingers inside to melt the Chucky Bar? No?”
Again, Josh shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t watch much TV—well, didn’t. I just want…”
Trace sighed and sipped at his drink. “A thousand apologies, Mr. Standing, I do tend to go off on a tangent sometimes, but the point of my story is a valid one, I feel. Too many times, my open-door policy to allow even the most subordinate of employees to come to me with their utterly worthless ideas meant I had less time to be brilliant on my own. And I’m sensing now that you’re going to offer up something as inane and valueless as one of those imbeciles. And yet here I am, being compassionate and accepting. It’ll be my downfall, Mr. Standing, you mark my words. It will be my downfall. Now you go ahead, and we can get this over and done with the least amount of pain… for myself.”
Josh’s head was throbbing with the surreal nature of the conversation, such as it was. There was a deep thread of threat and implied violence running beneath Trace’s words. The entire set-up of Parkopolis was testament to that, but the blithe tone, self-absorption, and insanely confident self-glorification on display just piled weighty levels of present danger into the room. Trace was not only dangerous, but he was childish, mercurial, and unpredictable. The knowledge that he’d been a high-ranking advertising executive at the top of his own firm perhaps explained in some ways why men like Harve, Jackdaw, and Steve followed him without the need to have those dearest to them threatened. Josh imagined that Trace Parker was indeed a very rich man and had promised wealth and control to those who followed him once things in the world got back into a more equitable condition.
Power bought with money and threat. It was ever thus. Pre- or post-apocalypse.
Which made the things Josh wanted to say even harder to articulate in a way that Trace and his ilk would find palatable.
Thank you. The last words of the man he’d shot in the Home Depot, reverberating through the moment. Josh would try for that reason alone.
Thank you. For those two words, if nothing else.
“The people in the city. The crazy ones, as you call them.”
“Yes?”
“They’re not crazy.”
&nbs
p; Trace laughed, and even Lacy suppressed a giggle.
“Have you been up close to them?” Josh asked.
“Well, I’ve shot a few. One needs a certain amount of intimacy for that.”
Josh shook his head. “Have you tried talking to any? Captured any?”
“No. Of course not. For the first few days, they were setting light to my property and trying to murder me. That tends to act as a barrier to good conversation, don’t you find?”
“Yes. I had similar experiences on the Sea-Hawk. But I’ve discovered something I think is significant. Something that might mean you don’t have to threaten anyone. Don’t have to keep kids in cages to make people work for you.”
Trace threw his head back and laughed, then stopped suddenly in mid-guffaw, dropping his eyes and fixing Josh with a stare made from razors. “I like keeping children in cages. It works. Why would I want to stop? Come, come, Mr. Standing, I’m feeling the boredom setting in…”
Josh held up his hands, the pistol in Jackdaw’s hand already smooshed into his ear. “Hands down, now,” Jackdaw hissed.
Josh put down his hands. “Okay, I’m sorry. Parker, the crazy people are not crazy. They can’t help themselves. Something changed in their brains, something fundamental. But the people who attacked us were starving themselves to death because they couldn’t help their acts of violence and rage. They’re not in control, but they can see what they’re doing is wrong. It’s horrifying to them. One of them thanked me after I’d shot him down. He thanked me because death would give him some peace. They’re not mindless zombies, they’re victims, and we—you—could be doing something good. We could be helping them. We could find some doctors. We could find some medication. Round them up, maybe. Treat them.”
“We could…?”
“This is not the way we should be allowing our fellow citizens to suffer, Parker. You have to see that. There’s a greater good to consider here. For the future.”
Trace handed his drink to Lacy, took his feet off her lap, and stood up, flexing his toes against the floorboards.
“What an over-developed sense of public duty you have, Mr. Standing. I would commend you if I didn’t want to see you hung from a tree for wasting my time.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way.”
Trace bent over at the hips, suddenly screaming into Josh’s face, spittle spraying over his cheeks. “Yes, it does! Yes, it damn well does, Mr. Standing! You know why it does? Because that’s how I want it! I am a king here. An unassailable king! Why would I want to work to fix this? What’s in it for me? Hmmm? I ask again, Mr. Standing, what’s in it for me?”
Josh knew then that he wasn’t dealing with a remotely rational despot; he was dealing with a sadist who enjoyed inflicting pain. Someone who got intrinsic comfort from the misery of others. As Trace returned himself to an upright position, smoothing down his jacket and twisting his neck to a more comfortable position behind the bright yellow cravat he wore, Josh could see no spark of humanity, duty, or empathy left inside the man. Whether it had been there before was debatable, but perhaps the switches that had been flicked in Trace’s head by the supernova had honed this part of his character to the sharpest of points.
As the gun pushed into his ear, and Trace retrieved his cane from the side of the chaise lounge, Josh wondered how close he was to death now. How close to the end was coming for him.
Trace Parker held the silver-topped cane across his body. One hand at each end. His arms were trembling slightly, and his pudgy face had a sheen of sweat over it that almost glowed in the candlelight in the room. Trace looked like he was building up to commit murder, psyching himself up behind those cold, wet eyes as Josh looked right back into them.
If he moved, Jackdaw would shoot him.
If Trace’s hand dropped from the silver end of the cane so he could use it as a club, then he was dead.
Josh tensed; whatever happened, he would have to react fast. He was on his knees, so that meant moving explosively would be difficult. He didn’t know how quick Jackdaw would be on the trigger, either, but it didn’t seem he’d get far before a bullet was fired.
Trace let the gnarled end of the cane swing free.
Club it was. Death was coming.
Josh readied himself, knowing Jackdaw wouldn’t fire before Trace made the first blow. He wouldn’t want to rob Trace of his sadistic moment of pain and murder. Josh decided he would push into the barrel of the gun, hoping to at least slide it over the top of his head before Jackdaw fired. He could reach up and take the wrist to turn the arm, perhaps as Jackdaw let another round go with a chance of burying it in Trace’s chest.
Maybe… but if the world was built from maybes, perhaps he wouldn’t have found himself where he was, about to be sacrificed to the rage of Trace Parker.
Trace took a step forward, his mouth a slit. His eyes bright as gimlets.
Trace raised the cane.
Wait ‘till it comes down.
Wait until it starts to move.
That’s when Jackdaw will hesitate. That’s when you’ll have your chance.
But the cane didn’t come down. The blow was not begun.
“Trace?”
It was Lacy.
Trace blinked. “Yes, my love?”
Trace bent his ear to her mouth, and Lacy whispered some sentence in his ear which Josh could not hear. Trace nodded.
“A good point well made, my dear.”
Trace turned back to Josh, his hand back on the silver head of the cane. The death blow had been averted. At least for now.
“It seems there may be something you can still help us with. Mr. Standing. Now, isn’t that a surprise?”
Poppet lay curled on a mattress under a filthy blanket when Josh was placed in the room with her. She was still sweating from withdrawal and shaking from the DTs, but there was color returning to her cheeks. The illness hadn’t entirely run its course, but being without alcohol for this long was at least giving her a chance.
“What… what are you doing here?”
Josh sat on the floor cross-legged. They still hadn’t bothered to handcuff him, knowing that there was little point—the room they’d put them in had no windows, the floorboards were solid, and he knew that after their last escape, there was someone waiting outside the door with a gun. And, anyway, why would he try to escape now? If he did, he would be consigning those children in the cage to Trace’s whims, and Josh wouldn’t do that until he knew how he was going to rescue them.
“In all honesty, Poppet, I don’t know. I thought Trace was going to kill me where I knelt, and he got mighty close.”
Josh shivered at the thought. The precariousness of life now hurt him. He was being held at the fulcrum between the madness caused by the supernova and the scourge of the sadism exemplified by people like Trace, who seemed above all to be using the advantage presented to them by this strange apocalypse to build power bases, subjugate populations, and live out whatever sick fantasies they might wish to. As a cop, Josh had met a number of evil people who’d truly been living across the line—but they hadn’t been the majority, the prevailing condition. They’d been the exception. All that Josh had seen from the moment the supernova had become apparent was the entire flipping of society. Nature, they say, is red in tooth and claw, but mankind had lifted themselves above that with morality, philosophy, laws, and understanding.
In a night, that had all been swept away.
And what was left in its wake was terrible and profoundly troubling. Josh had had no time until now to rationalize any of this to himself in any meaningful way, but now, after coming so close to meaningless death, he felt acutely the sense of meaning that had been sucked out of the world. No longer was everyone just working to improve the lot of their own or the world’s people; it seemed now that all that mattered was who you could kill or steal from.
Josh felt the hollowing in his soul. All established norms had dissipated, and his family had been scattered in that uncertainly.
“I wish Trace would kill me,” Poppet said sourly. “I feel like a burning train that fell off a mountain into the middle of an explosives factory. Just make it stop.”
Josh held out his arms.
Poppet said nothing, but understood. She crawled off the mattress and put her arms around Josh. He hugged the shivering gangster’s moll as much to comfort her in her withdrawal as to comfort himself in the intense swirl of uncertainty that surrounded him.
He didn’t know where his children were, where his wife was, or how he was going to get out of this mess.
All he had was this hug.
It was a start.
13
Dale Creggan, ex-bloodstock agent, was brash, beautiful, and blond. He could have been anywhere between thirty and sixty years old, and exuded a macho charm, but he also had an impressive flair for emotional intelligence. He knew how to act soothing and appear entirely calm—even gentle—so that he appeared nothing less than authentic. In fact, Maxine thought that if he hadn’t taken it upon himself to be a politician before the supernova, he certainly made a plausible one now. He sat in his office in the Pickford town hall, which had been built in a faux classical style, with Romanesque columns, a raked portico, and stylishly antique windows. It was a building that had not suffered the severe burning many of the other buildings Maxine had observed in her walk through the town. It was almost unique in that.
“We defended this building first and last,” Creggan explained in answer to Maxine’s enquiry. “It was some battle, but a bunch of like-minded folks congregated here as it became apparent that many in the town had become infected with the biological weapon dropped on the U.S. by foreign powers unknown. We fought a battle and then hunted down the stragglers. I see public health safety as my number one priority, Ms. Standing, I’m sure you understand.”
“I see a difference between public health safety and protection racketeering, myself,” Maxine told him, not bothering to correct his assumption that she wasn’t married. Whether he was being polite or not, she didn’t care—she had no plans to make this man her friend.
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 36
