by James O'Neal
The commander said, “You think raiders from the zone are grabbing women from the wilderness and selling them?”
Besslia nodded as he said, “Yes, sir.”
“Why were you over in that wasteland again?”
“The Naples area is part of our jurisdiction. I was over there looking for some evidence that might relate to Willie’s killer.”
“In Naples? What’s over there?”
“A report that references a fingerprint that’s the same as the killer.”
“Jesus, Naples has been abandoned for years. When was the report entered into the database?”
Besslia hesitated.
The commander said, “What?”
Wilner stepped in. “That’s the confusing part, boss. The report is forty years old.”
“And it has a fingerprint that matches the killer from last week?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is that the only reference?”
“No, there’s one from a murder in Pompano forty-nine years ago. And a few since then.”
“So your killer is like ninety. I woulda thought you’d notice that when you saw him the first night.”
“I just saw he had gray hair. But he wasn’t old. He moved like a cat. I never saw his face clearly.”
“So you two knuckleheads want permission to go into the zone and find these raiders?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’ll look into your killer over there at the same time?”
“They may be connected.”
“Willie, you think I’m a moron? I told you we need you guys here. The newcomers are our main concern. We gotta keep things quiet here.”
Besslia said, “The people over on the west coast are residents of Florida. The UPF is supposed to protect them too.”
“But from what you say they’re not paying any taxes. We’re already short-staffed. Give me one reason why we should get involved in something like that?”
Wilner looked him in the eye and said, “Because it’s the right thing to do.”
THIRTY
Johann Halleck had to admit to himself that he missed doing things like this. He had twelve men from the settlement in a clearing showing them how to operate the guns that they recovered from the old Naples police station and the ones that Steve Besslia had left him. They weren’t wasting ammunition, just learning the actions and sighting.
Johann called out to them as Jim Sewell walked between them, correcting positions and techniques.
Johann said, “This is not like a war. One good ambush and we should be done with these raiders. I won’t worry about how you clean the weapons, just fire and reload”
The moonlight peeked through some clouds. The gas lights surrounding the clearing provided a good low-light environment.
Victor stood up with a shotgun and walked over to Johann. “Where should we try and ambush them?”
“Since we don’t know their schedule or where they go after leaving the zone, I would say we get as close to their departure point as possible. Maybe even go into the Quarantine Zone and hit them at their base where they won’t expect it.”
“Is that safe?”
“Victor, none of this is safe. If you do nothing, it’s not safe. Don’t worry, I’ll be there with you.”
Victor nodded and leaned in closer. “That shotgun shell didn’t have faulty powder, how did you survive? I’m trusting you with our settlement’s safety. Trust me a little bit.”
Johann looked at him and considered the request.
“It’s complicated.”
“You’re not really part machine are you? I said you were a cyborg because I was excited.”
“No.”
“Alien?”
“No, I was born right here on Earth. In Norway, to be precise.”
“Then what?”
“I’m sort of another direction in the evolution of apes. Human took one route and my people took another.”
Victor stared at him. “I’ve heard rumors of immortals that live among us. I always associated them with Eastern Europeans.”
“That’s another family in my race.”
“How old are you?”
“Three hundred and fifty-seven.”
Victor looked unfazed.
“Any special powers other than healing?”
Johann leveled a stare at him and said, “I’m really good at crossword puzzles.”
Leonard Hall waited patiently while the two men drank the home-brewed beer served at the bar. They were subdued, talking between themselves. Leonard smiled because he knew what they were talking about.
After an hour they both stood and headed toward the front door.
Leonard was careful not to rush out behind them. He didn’t want anyone to connect him to whatever might happen to them. He eased up and turned toward the door, nodding to the one-armed dancer and laying down a ten-zone credit note on the stage.
She smiled and winked.
He slipped out the door without drawing any attention. Immediately he saw the two men walking west on the dusty empty street. He fell in at a slightly faster pace and pulled his combat knife. He worked the spike into an open position and used the shadows to creep ever closer to the two men.
They talked in low tones as the plan formed in his head.
He stayed in the shadows and came up on their right side, striking hard and fast into the first man’s neck. The blow was perfect. The release inside him intense. The man dropped so quickly and quietly that his friend thought he had stumbled.
He turned to his fallen comrade and said, “Too much beer?”
Then Leonard stepped from the shadows. Before the man could react Leonard plunged the spike into the man’s leg, just above his knee. Yanking it out fast he stuck the man’s other leg making him topple back, his hands reaching for the pain and trying to stop the spurt of blood that came from each side.
Leonard squatted down and put the sharpened tip of the spike to the man’s throat.
“Where’s your buddy with the eye patch?”
“Sammy? I don’t know. We all ran in different directions.”
“Where’s he live?”
The man started to cry. He pointed west. “Right up this street. That’s where we were headed. He usually goes to the club with us.”
“Where you buy beer with other people’s money; your taxes.”
“No, man. No more. You showed us we weren’t cut out for it.”
“Which house does Sammy live in?”
He kept pointing. “Four or five houses up on the right.”
Leonard put a little pressure on the spike, breaking the skin and causing a tiny stream of blood to run down the man’s neck. The sight of it excited Leonard.
The man swallowed hard and said, “I swear to God that’s the truth.”
“How can I be sure?”
“You can kill me if I’m lying.”
Leonard thrust the spike all the way through his thick neck and held it there as the man slowly turned his eyes toward him then went still.
When Leonard looked up from his bloody work he knew the man had been telling the truth. Sammy with the eye patch was staring at him from across the street.
THIRTY-ONE
Sammy Cyclops, a name he had been called for so long he now accepted it, gaped at the scene in front of him. His friend, Raul, seemed to stare at him even though the long spike was all the way in his neck. The handyman from the school looked up and their eyes met. He had seen the man at work. First in the old North Miami city hall, then at the school and now with the last witnesses; all except for him.
He managed to screw up enough courage to turn and run toward the busier area of the northern part of the zone. He ran without looking back because he knew it didn’t matter. If the handyman was gaining on him he couldn’t run any faster and he didn’t want to know what was coming.
He was younger than the killer but the older man was in good shape. He had stabbed half-a-dozen younger men to death and outrun them
at the school. He had acted like anything but an old man. He hardly acted like a man. The way he moved and stayed so calm. He was more like a superman.
Sammy gulped air as he turned one corner after another, knowing that if he slowed down his life was over. His life may not be much but he didn’t want to lose it.
His single eye searched for some safe harbor. He had lost the other eye to a simple infection before there were any working doctors or medicine down in the zone. That’s when he had acquired the obvious nickname. But down here, with no legal documents or courts, your name was what people called you. No one had called him Sammy Guilla in years.
Finally, several blocks away from where he had seen the demonic handyman, he slowed. There were a few lights on this street that everyone now called Market Row because of the shops. A few of the beverage and food stores were still open and a series of weak, gas-powered streetlights marked the sidewalk. A few people wandered around but no one paid attention to an out-of-breath, one-eyed bully like Sammy. He and his gang had exacted a tax from several of these store owners over the years but now he was a solo act.
He started to catch his breath and his mind returned to rational thought. But he wasn’t sure how rational it was to think of a man as a superman. There were rumors of immortal beings living among them. Some people said that they were just waiting for humans to kill themselves off so that they could live peacefully and forever. Sammy never paid much attention to the rumors until now. How else could the handyman do everything that he had?
He shivered, between the sweat and light drizzle he was now soaked through his light shirt.
He ducked into a doorway to escape the rain and relaxed slightly. Directly across the street was a group of young people under a small café’s awning. They laughed at someone’s joke and several looked across the street at Sammy. He didn’t care that he was the butt of someone’s joke as long as they noticed him. He leaned on the door frame and sucked in the cool night air. It burned his lungs but at least he was still breathing. Then he felt a cough rise up in his chest and the power of his raspy cough forced him to lean forward.
He felt a swish of air and heard a thump. Glancing over his shoulder he saw that the handyman had come in through the empty building and swung his spiked weapon at Sammy’s neck. It was now lodged in the door frame.
Sammy stumbled forward into the street and spun. The older handyman smiled as he yanked the spike out of the old wooden frame. He stepped toward Sammy, forcing him to trip backward and then catch himself.
He felt a hand on his back as he careened into the table where the young people were sitting.
“Get off me, you smelly drunk,” said a male’s voice.
Sammy straightened and looked back toward the handyman. He had no choice, he had to take his best shot and stand his ground. Maybe someone would help him from the table. His single eye searched for a weapon to use. Anything—a stick or butter knife.
Then he looked toward the street.
It was empty.
He turned his head to get a good look up both sides of the street. There was no sign of the killer handyman.
Sammy’s hands trembled and his legs felt weak. He was safe for now. It was times like this he wished there were cops in the zone so he could tell someone who might help him.
Tom Wilner and Steve Besslia had taken one of the nice government hives down to the zone. It was a rare official visit, sanctioned by their commander. The guy was an administrative bureaucrat but he knew the right thing to do when he saw it.
Besslia said, “I like how the boss said we could look for this guy after our regular duties were handled. We used to call that overtime.”
“What d’ya mean ‘we’? You and I never saw overtime. That was before the reorganization when we still had tax revenue.”
Besslia shrugged.
They had a few leads on the whereabouts of Janos Dadicek and his followers. There was no real address system left in the old Dade County, so directions were always a questionable commodity.
Besslia had indulged Wilner and they had made a quick visit to Mari at the school.
Besslia explained Johann Halleck’s desire to stay and help the settlers over there. He hoped to solve both the problems at once by finding Dadicek, arresting him for the murders and ending his raids on the defenseless settlers on the western side of Florida.
They spent the morning talking to any resident of the Miami Quarantine Zone they could about leads they could develop on the shadowy Janos Dadicek.
Finally Besslia said, “We need something to eat.”
Wilner looked up the quiet street and saw an open-air restaurant with grills on each side of a small open lot. A variety of tarps hung precariously from different-sized poles. It was the kind of place that wouldn’t be allowed to operate back in the district for health reasons.
Wilner just nodded his head toward it.
Besslia said, “I don’t care what we eat. Just need some food.”
They sat at an old, metal, folding table. A young Hispanic waitress said, “You’re visiting from the district, no?”
Besslia smiled. “Sure are. How’d you know?”
“I never seen you before. Sooner or later everyone eats here at Hugo’s.”
“How long you been in business?”
“My papa owned the building and restaurant that used to be here when it was still part of the United States. All together we been here thirty-four years.”
“Wow. What happened to the building?”
“Fire just after they closed the border. No firemen, no building. We been like this ever since.”
“Good food?”
“The best around. No synthetics. Everything fresh.”
“Got a menu?”
She smiled, her brown eyes lively. “We have a different special everyday and chicken sandwiches.”
Besslia gazed at her. “What’s the special?”
She swept some of her long, brown hair from her pretty face. “Today we have chicken of the tree, rice and beans.”
Wilner knew to ask, “Where’s the iguana from?”
“Local. My brothers catch them by the Zone River.”
Besslia made a face. “I never got used to eating iguana.”
“You eat reptile all the time at home.”
“But it’s in chunks and squares. I hate seeing legs and feet.”
Wilner looked up at the waitress and said, “Two specials.”
After ordering and allowing Besslia time to watch the cute waitress dart around the small restaurant, Wilner said, “I’d like to find someone who can ID Dadicek. Maybe someone who saw him near one of the murder scenes down here.”
“Why? It has to be him. And he has to be a Simolit.”
“We gotta be certain or more people could die. We need someone who’s been here for a long time and might know the man personally.” Then Wilner snapped his head up.
“What is it?”
“Hugo the owner. He’s been here a long time. He might know something.” He looked over to the grills. There were two young, wiry men grilling, and an older, heavy man barking orders in Spanish at them. That had to be Hugo.
THIRTY-TWO
Johann Halleck had not wasted any time putting Jim Sewell, the half crazy but dedicated Naples cop, to work. First he had used him to help train the settlers in basic combat skills and marksmanship, now they were on a recon to find out how the Zoners traveled back and forth between the zone and this wilderness so easily.
Johann was armed with an old M-20 U.S. Army surplus rifle. The M-20 had been the U.S. Army weapon that had evolved from the M-16 and M-18. Sewell carried his shotgun he had wielded for years since he was sent down into the bowels of the Naples police department to guard the evidence. He had spent many nights foraging for extra food and had proven comfortable in the wilderness that had consumed the city and surrounding area. There were a number of trails with corners of broken asphalt and cement popping up. The wilderness may have returned, but there was stil
l plenty of evidence of man’s time in the area.
Four settlers had come with them. If something happened to him or Sewell he wanted to at least give the men of the settlement a chance to defend themselves. The first step was understanding how the raiders entered the area.
Victor, the de facto leader of the settlement, had been quiet about Johann’s admission to being more than human. His interest laid more in the stars.
As they tromped along a wide path with their mismatched weapons slung over their shoulders or draped in their arms, Victor slid up close to the much taller Johann.
“You know what I have missed all these years in the wild?”
Johann looked down at the man’s short legs taking two strides for each of his. “What have you missed, Victor?”
“Outer space.”
“You can see the stars more clearly than most from your village.”
“But not the details about meteors and eclipses and the aliens. I spent most of my life dreaming about the stars. I watched old sci-fi movies, Discovery Channel specials and read every magazine about science I could lay my hands on. Then when the aliens were detected it was like my whole life had a point. I was so excited about what the Urailians would be like. How we would first meet. Everything.”
“Then why run away when things were getting so interesting?”
“I told you, it was everything else. But when I think about it, everything else was all man-made. The wars, terror attacks, even the worst plague was produced in a lab. I let men chase me away from what was so interesting.”
“You can get radio reception over in your settlement, maybe even some video broadcasts.”
Victor shook his head. “No, most of that is shielded. We get a few Spanish-language stations and one wild neo-Christian, anti-Islam station but they never have news.”
“Maybe a trip into civilization would do you some good once in a while.”
“If stealing women is civilization to you, I don’t want any part of it.”
Johann laughed. “I see your point.” He was about to say something else when he heard a noise up ahead and motioned for everyone to take cover.
