“Well, we’re always looking for good men, Mr. Rennie, and those that come to Pickford––free of disease, of course––and with such fine…” he revolved the grenade in his fingers, “…credentials will always find a welcome in our town.”
It was as much as Josh could do not to throw up on Creggan’s desk. The queasy head rush he’d gotten from being in the vicinity of the hangings was beginning to dissipate, but it was still there in the background. Like a fly buzzing around a dead dog.
He leaned back in the green leather chair he’d been offered when he’d entered Creggan’s office, hoping his face wasn’t pale with nausea. Josh had seen plenty of death since the supernova, some of it at his own hands when he’d been defending himself or his children, and in Parkopolis he’d seen the effects of extra-judicial murder hanging from gibbets on the route into the camp… but being present, hearing men sobbing as nooses were put around their necks, and hearing those sentences being carried out took disgust to a whole new level. Josh had never considered himself squeamish, or necessarily against the death penalty for the most heinous crimes, but this… this was something else, and he was having the devil’s own time fitting the size of it inside his head so that he could concentrate on the matter in hand.
Randy had taken Josh into the building when the business at the gallows had been concluded. Josh’s spine still tingled with adrenaline. He’d kept his eyes averted as a scene from another time had been played out just yards away, but not been able to help hearing it all. The shuffling feet of the onlookers. The gasps as the trapdoors had clacked open simultaneously.
The thuds of the ropes snapping taut with their deathly weight had cracked something open in Josh.
Yet again, he was shocked to the core over what the world had descended to in such a short time. Revolution might only be two meals away, but it seemed the moral compass of so many was being smashed beneath the boot heels of a persuasive despot, full belly or not. Blame the outsider. Tell your people they carry disease. Enforce the law with brutality and only a nod towards judicial process––telling the population you’re doing it for their own good and that you’ll keep the other out while clinging to power. Josh knew the form and knew the playbook––it was just knotting his insides that so many would fall for it. Creggan didn’t need there to be a disease. He just had to tell people there was one in a believable way.
“So, there are a few things we’ll need before we let you stay.”
“The location of the ammo dump?”
Creggan put the grenade down on his blotter and steepled his fingers. “Oh, no, no, no, Mr. Rennie, I realize the location of the ammo dump is your… capital in this transaction. If I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t be giving that information away any time soon, and I completely understand why that might be the case. No. The first thing we’ll need to do is have you undertake a thorough examination by our doctor––to see if you show any signs of infection.”
“But I’ve already been in town. Among your people. If I were infected, then they would be already.”
Creggan smiled. “We believe the sickness is passed on by direct skin-to-skin contact, Mr. Rennie. You’ve not been allowed to touch anyone since you came here. And you’ll notice I didn’t shake your hand.”
Josh could recognize the flimflam of a confidence trickster when he heard it. This was all BS, and Creggan knew it, too. It was just another layer of fearful propaganda Creggan was putting out to control those around him. But now wasn’t the time to argue with Creggan. Now was the time to go along with the pretense. Anything else might lead to Josh swinging from the same gallows as the other men.
“Sure,” Josh said. “I’ll see your doctor. Other than tired from a long day’s walking, I’m feeling fit and well.”
Creggan grinned. “Then that’s settled. You’ll see Doctor Hauser now, and then Randy will find you somewhere to stay. We’ll talk tomorrow when I get back from dealing with a little local difficulty once and for all.”
Josh got up and automatically stuck out his hand to shake with Creggan––his mind on the little local difficulty, and how that was more than likely to be another assault on the now deserted M-Bar—but Creggan waved his finger as if he was admonishing an errant child.
“No, Mr. Rennie. Let’s see what Doctor Hauser says first before we shake hands. I’m sure you understand.”
Josh dropped his hand. “Of course, Mr. Creggan. Just can’t wait to make this a permanent deal. I like the setup you have here. Discipline and a real sense that you want to survive this hell. I like that. I like that a lot.”
Randy took Josh out of the town hall and down the steps. He’d not been allowed to have the grenades, guns, or the pack. They’d been left in Creggan’s office until he got “the all-clear from Doctor Hauser.”
Outside on the steps, the air was chillier, with a breeze coming down from the direction of Copper’s Bluff. The crowd had dispersed once the executions had been done. The bodies had been cut down––not left on display as they had been in Parkopolis––and Josh was thankful for that, at least, although the frayed ends of the ropes still hung where they had been cut, gently swaying.
“This way,” Randy said, pointing across the street to a building designated the Pickford Sherriff’s Office by a sign which predated the supernova. The walls bore the scars of some bullet holes, and a couple of the windows in the blocky, black-bricked modern building had been boarded up.
“I thought I was going to see this Doctor Hauser… not the sheriff…”
Randy nudged him in the small of the back with the butt of his gun. “Just keep walking, Mr. Rennie. You’ll see Doctor Hauser in there. It’s where she runs her tests.”
The sheriff’s department was lit by storm lanterns which were running on a thick, smoky oil. Tan patches of grease were already on the ceiling. The office itself was like many small-town law enforcement offices that had made Josh’s acquaintance. A large amount of laminated wood-effect desks and frosted glass partitions. Some of which had been punched through at some point in the recent past.
None of the men sitting around the desks were in uniform, but some of them did have stars pinned to their T-shirts. No one spoke as Randy followed Josh in, but all eyes looked up from where the men were playing cards.
A wide fellow, deep into middle-age, and with a mustache that could have gotten him an understudy role in the Village People, raised a questioning eyebrow at Randy.
“Come from Creggan. To see Doctor Hauser for testing.”
The Village People nodded them through between two partitions. A second guy with a star and hair that was shaggy like the mane of a lion put his cards facedown on the table and unlocked an inner door.
Josh saw that beyond the door was a set of steps leading down to where he guessed cells were. “Down there?” Josh looked at Randy, who was waiting impatiently for him to go forward. Randy nodded his assent. “Doctor Hauser likes to carry out her tests in a secure environment. Some people flip out unexpectedly.”
Josh felt that it wasn’t just the lion-maned deputy who made him feel like he was moving into the lair of predators at this point, but he’d come this far, and as he was unarmed, there was very little he could do about changing the circumstances.
Josh went through the door and down the steps.
There were six cells, three on either side of a narrow corridor. The doors were steel, painted institutional red with slide-open viewing ports at head height and a mail slot-like opening for passing trays of food through.
The last cell door on the right was the only one that was open, and Josh walked towards it with Randy in tow. There were more storm lanterns down here, and it gave the feeling that they were walking into an ancient cave full of shadows and old bones. The place smelled bad, too. The stink of the incarcerated. The smell of their sweat and their waste.
There was a dankness to the air which clung thickly inside his nostrils. No cell blocks were pleasant places, but this one was going out of its way to be unpleasant.<
br />
Before Josh reached the open cell door at the end of the corridor, the cell door on the middle left swung open and a gray-haired woman with an arrow-point chin and glasses smaller than her eyes came out holding a small medical tray, on which was balanced a hypodermic needle.
“Oh Ghad!” she said as she saw Randy and Josh. “Not another one.”
There were stains of pink blood well-soaked into the arms of her white coat. She looked less a doctor and more a butcher.
As she shook her head and closed the cell door behind her, Josh got a good look into the cell beyond her.
On the bed against the far wall, a man was groaning, deliriously waving a weak fist around in the air, his elbow balanced on a filthy blanket.
His face was streaked with blood and caked with filth. But even that didn’t hide his identity from Josh.
It was Maxine’s father. Donald Jefferson.
10
Storm Standing awoke the next morning after having the best night’s sleep he could remember in a very long time. The campfires had burned out, but the shelters built by Tally, Henry, and the Defenders had kept the dew off the sleepers via their cover of branches and ferns. There were a few people moving around the camp already. He could see Poppet through the fringe of his shelter’s canopy, and she was talking to Keysell and Larry, presumably about the day’s journey. It wasn’t yet full light, and so the trees around them were gloomy and dark, but he could see some brightness between the branches.
Storm was glad to note there was no pain or heat in his wound. The painkillers Larry had given him made him feel a little woozy, but they really had the juice. The skin felt stiff beneath the dressing, and a little itchy––but Mom had always told him that an itchy wound was a healing wound.
With a few logistical challenges and the judicious shield of a blanket, Storm relieved himself into a bottle and screwed the cap back on, then struggled up onto his elbows and into a sitting position. Tally was still asleep at the other end of the shelter, and she snuffled and sniffed beneath her blanket. He was also glad to feel the anger towards his sister from their headbutting over Josh last night had all but left him.
The irony of having his family back together, but with it being more fragmented than ever, was not lost on him. Long before the supernova, he’d been insulated from the problems in his family, away at UNC in Chapel Hill on an assisted athletics scholarship. Like Tally, he was a naturally gifted athlete, but where she’d always been focused on X-Sports such as free-running and climbing, Storm was a strong runner who had represented both his school and college in track meets over a variety of distances. His favored track event, however, was the 400 meters—The Man Killer, as it had been known in the less PC days of yore.
The one-lap sprint. Relentless. Unstoppable. The breaker.
The sprint that grated chunks out of your lungs and turned your limbs into stiffened rust. But he’d been good enough. Good enough to get a place at UNC among the elite Tar Heels. Storm had excelled both athletically and academically until the onset of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma had turned the sprint his life had become into the slog of a marathon.
Leaving his university to go back home to Morehead City, moving back in with his parents, and splitting his time there with chemotherapy in Boston had shown him how much had changed in the two years he’d been away—only coming back between terms—since his dad had left the cops and changed careers.
Tally had become someone who couldn’t wait to get away to run and climb. His dad would skim through the house if they were lucky, but only when he wasn’t chasing up some car-jacking drug-dealer kid in Jacksonville, and Maxine, his mom, had begun working as much as she could so she didn’t have to rattle about in the hollow spaces at home. The fights and the shouting had erupted when both parents spent time in the house, and it had drained Storm to experience it… almost as much as the chemotherapy had.
He’d begged his mom to get him some part-time work at the hospital so that he wouldn’t go crazy at home—a job where they could be flexible with his hours because he had good days and bad—so they’d come up with an admin position in the accounts department, facilitating Medicare paperwork. It hadn’t been taxing, the people he’d worked with had been fine enough, and it had sure beat the hell out of staying at home and listening to the house setting its teeth on edge, waiting for the next round of the Maxine vs. Josh World Title Fight of Pre-Divorce.
He’d done what he could to put himself between Maxine and Josh—not that their fights had ever gotten physical—doing something to pour oil on the turbulent waters. He’d distract his dad, talking to him about something he’d read or seen on TV, and that would take the heat out. With Maxine, he’d talk about his treatment or how he was feeling—her medical antenna being easier to turn in his direction when he offered information about himself.
When those gambits hadn’t worked, he’d gone into town to watch Tally bouncing off walls, backflipping off fences, and side-piking over barriers with her friends. When they would get back to the house, it had often seemed as though, when the fighting had ended, the house had been encased in solid silence.
Sometimes, Storm wished he hadn’t had to go home at all. Wished he could have stayed in Boston, or just stopped the treatment altogether and gone back to the Loudermilk Center for Excellence at UNC to expire amongst his Tar Heel buddies.
But all that was so long ago, it seemed like it was from another lifetime, or perhaps the life of someone else.
Now, the world was upside down. He was weak as a baby and healing from the double-hits of cancer and surgery.
Just another day in paradise.
Tally stirred and opened her eyes. She looked across the shelter to Storm, and he gave her a weak smile. “Hey, sleepyhead.”
Tally sat up and rubbed at her eyes, then picked a twig out of her hair. “How are you feeling?”
He could see in her face that she was testing the waters of his temper. Seeing where he was at after their semi-fight last night.
It was also the question through which almost every conversation that had been started with Storm over the last year and a half had begun. Pretty soon, you run out of answers that don’t sound self-pitying or sarcastic. “I don’t know. I’ll let you know when I stop feeling like I’ve been ten rounds with Tally-Two.”
Tally smiled, crawled out from her blanket, and pulled on her jeans. “You forgiven me yet?”
“For?”
“Last night.”
Storm and Tally had never been combative siblings. They’d rubbed along just fine for the most part, the three-year age gap keeping them comfortably close as contemporaries, but with enough of a distance for neither of them to feel shadowed by the other. They liked different books, different TV shows, and different music, and had their own social circles––especially since Storm had gone off to UNC.
There’d never been any awkwardness between them, but Storm felt the possible start of one lately. Especially if Tally continued to defend Josh to both her brother and Maxine, there’d be a real one soon. And he guessed that was why Tally was asking about forgiveness.
Last night, Tally had heard the edge of the conversation Maxine and Storm were having about Josh being so focused on his job, rather than his family, and she’d weighed in vehemently.
“You didn’t see him on the Sea-Hawk, Storm. I kinda get him more now than I did before. Those kids didn’t have anyone rooting for them––ever. Not their moms or anyone.”
“I’m not saying his heart’s not in the right place, Tally… it’s just… I might have needed someone rooting for me, too.”
“He was! God, Storm, he was. He was torn up by your illness, really.”
“He should have come to Boston with me. Not left it all to Mom.” Storm had met Maxine’s eyes, who’d just let the conversation between her two children go on around her. Storm didn’t know if it was because she still didn’t want to be seen taking sides when it came to the two of her children, or because she couldn’t bring herself t
o defend Josh in front of him. Either way, emboldened by not being checked by Maxine, Storm had continued. “I could have done with a dad around, you know?”
Tally had had no answer to that.
“I’ve been in a hole, Tally, and the only one helping to pull me out has been Mom. I wouldn’t have made it even as far as here from Boston if it hadn’t been for her. And what happened to you when you got off that ship? Did Dad even bother to try to find you? Did he?”
Tally’s eyes and mouth had been O’s of shock. “He was captured, Storm. Forced to go into Savannah at gunpoint! He couldn’t come and find me.”
“So, he says,” Storm had said bitterly. “Convenient, to say the least.”
“Don’t be such an idiot!” Tally had spat, making fists. Red anger had been burning in her eyes.
At that point, Maxine had stepped in and told the two of them to stop arguing. Storm had been helped into the shelter, and Tally, whose gear had already been inside, had followed him in. They’d both gone to sleep without a word to one another. But now that the morning had arrived and the tension had dissipated, they could reset and get on with the day.
Back in the buggy with Maxine, the party headed on up into the hills. The day had started misty, with a little chill, and there was the threat of rain, but they were making good progress; by mid-morning, they stopped again in a picnic area which showed signs of recent occupation. They noticed a burned-out fire and a bunch of opened cans of corned beef.
A search of the immediate area by Keysell’s men didn’t turn up anybody, but the party decided not to stay in the picnic area for more than thirty minutes, rather than taking the usual hour they would plan for a break. Keysell said the signs of occupation didn’t necessarily present a threat, but the attack on Tally the day before, as well as their exposure between the M-Bar and Cumberland, meant they shouldn’t take too many risks where they could help it. It was easy to become complacent, he said, and Henry and Poppet agreed.
Storm was feeling more comfortable as the buggy rocked and bounced along after the break. It seemed that almost every hour brought him closer to strength. He wouldn’t be running a man-killer any time soon, but considering what he was recovering from, he was happy to at least be experiencing improvement.
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 60
