“Stay chill, gents,” Vir whispered. “Say to yourself, hey, that truck looks bloody familiar, don’t it?”
He eased off the accelerator. Instinct made him keep his head on a swivel, checking either side of the road even as he drew closer to the gate. A couple hundred yards out now, and he squinted. The man on the right Browning looked like Graham Burke. As soon as sunlight glinted off of the round spectacles worn by the man on the right, he smiled to himself. Ivan Dantzler was the man on the other gun. He knew and had worked with each man, but better than that, he knew them both to be solid. Neither was the sort of rookie who might riddle a vehicle with bullets on accident. Of course, if it was going to happen, it was going to happen at any moment. He lifted his foot completely off of the accelerator and let the truck coast forward.
At once, Burke lowered the barrel of his Browning. He turned and began shouting with cupped hands. Vir was close enough to see Dantzler squint, and mouth a “What the hell?” before lowering his own gun.
Burke turned to Vir and waved him forward. Below him, the gates began to open. He let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, and put his foot back on the pedal. The truck had almost come to a stop by now, and it surged forward through the gates. He’d made it.
Vir slowed to a stop and rolled his window down the rest of the way. The guards from the gate bunkers were milling around, and he put the vehicle in park as Dantzler leaped off of his bunker and sprinted over. The other man climbed up on the running board and proclaimed, “Damn, old boy, what the hell’s going on?” Dantzler was a slight, wiry man with receding curly brown hair. He wore a pair of old-fashioned round, wire-frame glasses, and looked like an accountant or lawyer. Despite his Germanic last name, his accent was pure Louisiana. Vir had always liked him, Dantzler was quick with a joke and quicker with a grin, but he had the capacity to speak well on a variety of topics. All too often, wall duty consisted of groaning about what one missed more, professional football or college basketball.
Vir was about to answer, but the hulking shape parked near the wall just past the gate bunker stunned him to silence. When did we get a bloody tank?
Dantzler followed his eyes and turned back with a laugh. “The Marines have landed, my man. Looks like civilization might just be coming back to us. Had a nice little speech yesterday. This whole place is giddier than a school girl on prom night.”
“Right,” Vir said and shook his head to regain his train of thought. “Buck and the others didn’t make it. There was a bloody damn horde inside the warehouse. They got overrun and the other truck got damaged. It may be salvageable, but it was more than I could do on my own.” He shrugged. “I loaded up as much as I could find, all the critical stuff, anyway.”
Dantzler stared at him. “Well, damn. You are a bona fide, a-number-one hero, ain’t you?”
Vir grimaced. “Just doing my part, Ivan. You mind radioing ahead for me? I’m going to pull right up to the clinic and start offloading this stuff. I imagine good Doctor Matthews will be happy to have it.”
“Right,” Dantzler said and hopped down. “You got it, superhero.” He made a joking salute and flashed a grin at Vir. “Don’t let me keep you.”
Vir returned the nod and dropped the vehicle back into drive. Despite his fatigue, a buzz of adrenaline was running through him. Hopefully, his report to Miles would be fast and he could get home to Aasha and the boys. It wasn’t like his undercover work had been a smashing success. Sure, he’d established who’d been getting some of the ingredients into the community. But he was nowhere near helping find out who was actually making the stuff.
Of course, he reflected with a small, satisfied grin, without a ready supply of ingredients, it was going to be hard for their mystery man to continue his illicit work.
Chapter 16
It wasn’t as though he’d sprung forth fully-formed from the forehead of a criminal mastermind. He’d never made it his goal in life to be a drug dealer, either. Ivan Dantzler’s childhood had been pedestrian and, if he were being honest, not a little pampered. An only child, his parents provided him with love, affection, a roof over his head, and three squares a day.
It had been so tedious.
The level of his annoyance with his own life hadn’t hit him until one summer day during his junior high years. He was riding his bike, without a care in the world, when he drove past an empty lot in an ordinary — and tedious — residential neighborhood in his hometown of Luling, Louisiana. A couple of the bigger kids, renowned in the neighborhoods and in school as being bullies, were kicking around one of the other kids, who was also well-known, though for different reasons. For a moment, young Dantzler paused, one foot on the sidewalk, still perched on his bike, and considered the tableau. He almost pedaled off. But something inside him saw what was happening, assessed the probabilities, and saw an opportunity.
He was on the first bully’s back before his bike clattered to the ground, and the boy didn’t know what hit him. Ivan Dantzler was only of middling height and weight, and even then near-sighted enough to need glasses, but he was not, by any stretch of the imagination, weak. He was fast, wiry-strong, and relentless.
Each of those qualities combined into one as he rode the first bully to the ground and slammed him face-first into the crumbled asphalt of the empty lot. The larger boy’s nose went with a wet splat, and he gave a high-pitched squeal as blood began to course down over his lips.
For a moment, the entire scene seemed to freeze. Victim and aggressors stared at Dantzler as though unsure how to proceed. At once, time reasserted itself, and the second bully surged toward Ivan with an articulate roar.
It was painful — one could almost say tedious — how easy it was. Ivan slid to one side and offered a helpful foot. When the second bully tripped and landed on top of his companion with a huff of expelled air, Ivan jumped up and planted both feet in the center of the boy’s back, driving the air even further from his chest. So quick was the strike that the second bully couldn’t even breathe, but Ivan didn’t let up. He stepped off, oriented himself, and placed a quick snap-kick between the second boy’s legs. He’d gotten a little breath back, but the extent of what he could manage was a low wheezing sound. Ivan waited a moment, and then gave him another shot in the balls for good measure.
Both lay there almost motionless. The boy on top wept and clutched his aching crotch. The first boy still struggled to get out from under his friend and stem the flow of blood from his nose. Ivan noted, with not a little satisfaction, that it lay over one to one side.
“Get on,” Ivan whispered, as though he were making an observation about the weather. The two larger boys scrambled to their feet and looked as though they were preparing to wade into the fray once more. Something in Ivan’s carriage or expression dissuaded them of that notion. They took up their own bikes and pedaled away as fast as they could.
Dantzler turned and looked down on the kid who they’d been beating on. Dust smeared his face from the ground of the lot, though blood from one nostril and tears from both eyes had cut clean tracks through the mess. “What’d they want?” Dantzler said, in a kind tone.
“Last year I started giving them my lunch money twice a week. I was playing here and they rode by . . . They wanted me to keep paying them this summer, too.”
Ivan knelt down and made eye contact with the other boy. “You don’t have to worry about them any longer. Not this summer, and not when school starts back up. I just need one thing from you.”
“What’s that?” the other boy asked, eager.
“I want your lunch money once a week. Just when school’s in, too. Vacation time, it’s all yours.” He clapped the other boy on the shoulder and put a broad grin on his face. “Sound fair?”
The sheer gratitude the little loser exhibited was almost embarrassing. But it taught Dantzler a key lesson of human nature. So long as you make things hurt less than the alternative, and put a happy face on it, why, folks will hop to pay up.
Oh, he was sm
art about it, of course. He never took more than a taste, and he never spread his net wide enough to attract attention. By the time he graduated from high school — with honors, of course — Ivan Dantzler had become friends with some interesting people. That made life so much less tedious. They encouraged him on to college but kept him in mind when they had jobs that needed to be done.
Four years later, as his fellow graduates scrambled for jobs, Ivan Dantzler already had one. His infrequent jobs had turned into a position as the Dixie Mafia’s newest — and most charming — enforcer.
They didn’t send Dantzler to do anything so mundane as breaking fingers or kneecaps. No, the pleasant-looking young man with old-fashioned round spectacles was something of a specialist. More often than not, a pleasant conversation with the curly-haired young man ended well. Accounts that had been in arrears were all at once paid up. The alternative was coming home to discover your toddler had disappeared, or your house had burned to the ground while your wife napped on the couch.
Time passed, and as with any organization, performance and success on Dantzler’s part meant promotion. And so, on one otherwise ordinary Wednesday, with a cooling, tarp-wrapped corpse in the trunk of his sedan, a traffic jam became ground zero for the feasting of crazed, silver-eyed cannibals.
The turn of events didn't stun him as it did so many others. No, Dantzler’s reaction was best summed up as curiosity. It had been self-evident after his college psychology classes that he was a particularly nasty form of sociopath. Sitting in his car amidst sudden onset cannibalism, he couldn't help but wonder. Had he finally gone off of his rocker?
A screaming woman pounded on the driver’s window of his car, begging for him to let her in. He watched, expression blank, as a dozen of the rough beasts the denizens of this particular slice of Middle America had become pulled her away.
At that moment, Dantzler realized that he was free. The old, binding rules no longer applied, and the name of the game was mere survival. In a world remade for ruthless men, Ivan Dantzler fit the bill.
That dream ended in short order, of course. He learned that murder and mayhem were only fun when you could kowtow potential victims into terrified acquiescence of their fate. The beasts that ruled the new world feared nothing and often gathered in numbers that presented Dantzler with more of a challenge than he desired.
For the sake of his own survival, Ivan put on his old, friendly mask. He found a community where he was not only trusted but secure.
But . . . something was missing. For a while, he contented himself with standing watches on the wall and indulging in the occasional supply run to pad his small cache of luxuries. The days began to drag, and the people surrounding him became inane. They were so earnest. A good chunk of the population were mental cases, but at least they weren’t boring.
People like him always attracted like-minded fellows, as though there was some sort of subconscious radar that homed in on the lust and greed like flies seeking out rotten meat. The capacity for personal profit had always been there, but the icons of the community held sway on any thoughts he might have entertained of going off of the reservation. Dantzler was cunning enough to know that Larry Vance or the Matthews boys would destroy him if he gave them the excuse. Get drunk and smack around a lady friend once, and you could bank on a weekend drying out and a little social awkwardness. Repeat it, and the hammer of doom was likely to fall on you.
So for a time, Ivan watched and waited. He considered the angles and the opportunities, and when it came to him, he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it sooner.
Coffee and tea were still available, although not in the instant-gratification quantities people had once been accustomed to. On top of that, many of the members of the community still weren’t acclimated to the sort of long-term, low-grade physical labor that subsistence farming required, even after they were able to produce enough biodiesel to use machinery for some of the work. A morning pick-me-up had been a long-term habit for so many of the survivors that the absence of plentiful caffeine was jarring. Some overcame, but for others, it was still a struggle. Abuse of prescription painkillers had been the drug of choice for middle America in the years before the end. A few of the survivors had the habit, but fentanyl and hydrocodone were, if possible, in shorter supply than coffee. The addicted survivors had either kicked the habit or died trying.
Ivan himself had never cooked, but he was familiar enough with the requirements. A few of his people did know the methods, and a few more were on the salvage crews. It was simple enough to entice the latter into collecting the necessary supplies. Dantzler’s moves were so slow and methodical, the straight-laced dupes running the show hadn’t even noticed what was happening until the operation had been up and running for almost a year.
Finding somewhere to conduct the illicit manufacture was another issue. The fumes the process gave off were not only nasty, they were obvious, even in the middle of a camp lousy with open cooking fires. In an ironic twist, the wall that kept them safe was the eventual solution to that dilemma.
The crew building the wall placed the southeastern corner in deference to the run of Stone Creek across the southern border of the community. Before Z-Day, the county highway department had just completed repaving the road and installing larger storm drains. The output for one of those drains emerged right under the southeastern corner of the wall. At this point, the wall was closest to the creek — a mere six feet from the edge of the bank. The culvert dog-legged from its straight path from the road to come out at an angle in the creek. Were it laid at much more of an angle, it would have required a shift in the placement of the wall. As it was, the last section of the culvert was only a few feet in front of the southeastern corner.
The six-foot diameter corrugated pipe wasn’t visible from atop the wall, but as soon as Dantzler had seen the top curve of it sticking out from the bank, he’d known the solution to his troubles.
The bunker at the southeast corner helped reinforce the shift from chain link to board. It had taken some patience, but over time, Dantzler had orchestrated enough personnel switches that the three men in that bunker worked for him.
After that, it was easy. Dantzler and his three buddies built their small, adjoining sleeping quarters next to the southeastern bunker. He’d worried at first that someone would have objected to the siting of the shack along the southern fence, rather than against the more solid eastern wall, but if anyone noticed or cared, they never made mention of it. The wall of the shack had a concealed half door that opened up beside one of the southern fence’s support poles. They’d replaced the wire securing the fence to the pole at the lower corner with several twist-on pieces rather than the heavy-duty crimps used on the rest of the fence. It weakened the structure at that point, but Dantzler and his friends weren’t suicidal. With the wall of the shack abutting the fence it was still plenty strong.
Such an arrangement would never have worked in the early days. As the population of the cannibals fell, there was no longer a constant presence at the wall. The short walk to the mouth of the culvert could be nerve-racking, though Dantzler chafed at the notion that he’d grown accustomed to the security of the walls.
They’d installed a heavy gate of heavy iron bars a few steps inside of the culvert. It was solid enough to secure against cannibals or unauthorized inspections, but open enough for water to drain through. The interior got a bit damp at times, but anything left in there long term stayed up high on shelving they’d rigged, or wrapped in plastic.
This was all becoming moot in short order, of course, given what he’d just heard from that goody two-shoes Vir. Ivan Dantzler sighed as he mentally calculated the extent of the supplies he’d been able to sock away versus what he’d wanted to have.
All things considered, perhaps it’s time for a reduction in headcount. He grinned as he approached the southeastern bunker, raising a hand in greeting. His facial expression betrayed nothing of his thoughts.
Ben Carlyle was the man on duty at the
moment. He noted Dantzler’s approach, returned the gesture, and turned back to survey the area outside of the fence.
Ol’ Ben’s a big guy, and handy in a fight. None too bright, but that’s okay. Course, he also eats a hell of a lot and snores. His smile broadened. Sorry Big Ben, looks like you’re the first pink slip.
He pulled open the door and stepped inside the bunker. The remaining men on the crew, Victor Kerr and Lloyd Granger, sat at a small table playing a card game. When they saw him enter, both looked up in greeting but waited to see if he was alone before speaking further. Canny, both of them. Victor Kerr had been a diesel engine mechanic before the Day, and Lloyd a line worker in one of the factories. There wasn’t much work for Victor these days, but he supplemented his duties on the wall by assisting in the ongoing maintenance of the community’s vehicle fleet. Lloyd was just a cog, simple labor.
Sorry, Lloyd. Looks like you’re on the chopping block.
“Bad news, fellas,” Dantzler said as he dropped into an empty chair. “Buck and most of his crew got wiped out.”
“Shit,” Lloyd hissed. “What happened?”
“I couldn’t get the full story just yet, but it doesn’t matter. The only survivor was that Singh cat. He looks to have brought back plenty of medical supplies. It's up in the air if any of our stuff is on the truck.” And, he didn’t say, with a replenished supply of IV fluids, the laid-up customers were now more likely to wake up and recover. Would they be eager to rat out their dealers after almost dying from the product? Dantzler thought there was a pretty good chance of that.
A Place Outside The Wild Page 23
