Chapter Twenty-Three
Delaney looked like a ghost town. It was, or had been, a crossroads with a gas station, a small hardware store, a café, and a dozen or so frame homes. Wolfe parked Becca in the backseat of an old, abandoned Plymouth minivan and crept forward alone. If there were Regulators around, they hadn’t posted any guards or set up any defenses against Mistress Alethia and her minions.
Minions, Wolfe thought, with an amused half smile. He never met a minion before he came to Paradise. Now, he had met several of them. He became more sober. Killed some, too. He hated that, but did not see that he really had any choice in the matter—not if he wanted to keep on living himself. And, as long as there was the slightest shred of hope that Lurleen and Jojo might still live, he intended to remain alive to find them.
He made a slow circle around the tiny town of Delaney, then silently passed by several of the outlying houses and approached the building that had been a gas station. Signs still in place showed that the station also offered snacks, sodas, small engine repairs. Now there was an appetizing combination.
The gas station seemed to have been abandoned. So did the café next door. Although, the café door was closed and locked, blinds drawn down over the glass at the windows and the front door.
“Hello?” Wolfe called softly. “Is anyone here?”
There was no response. Not that he really expected one. He walked more quickly and openly this time out the road leading to the east, and tapped on the side window of the Plymouth. “Becca, you can come out now.”
There was no response. Probably fell asleep, he guessed. She would be tired after walking fifteen miles. He went around to the other side of the minivan and pulled the sliding door open. “Becca, wake up. It’s okay. Wake up and come out now.”
When there was still no answer, Wolfe stuck his head inside the rusting Plymouth. “Rebecca?”
He heard a thin, high-pitched squeak. Then the twin muzzles of a double-barrel shotgun touched the side of his face.
“Don’t move.”
The instruction was entirely superfluous. Wolfe had no intention of challenging a double-barrel scattergun at point blank range. Not on his life.
Chapter Twenty-Four
They held Wolfe in what had been a storage room at the back of the gas station. He was not tied up, but he’d had to deposit the rucksack in the front room beside a useless cash register. And one of the men—there were three of them—asked him very politely for the bowie. Wolfe looked at the shotgun first, then meekly handed over the big knife.
They hadn’t searched him and he still had a folding lock blade knife in his pocket, but had no illusions about overcoming all odds with just that for a weapon. The dog really did not count in the weapon category, he decided, leaning down to ruffle its fur and scratch behind its ears.
Becca had been taken elsewhere by the Regulators; at least, he assumed these were some of the dreaded Regulators. Dreaded, that is, by the people of Paradise. So far, Wolfe could not see that there was all that much difference between them, except that the Regulators seemed to be older and not so well-dressed. Everyone in Paradise wore the uniform grey sweatshirts and blue jeans. The men in Delaney dressed like any country folk might. He hoped they behaved better than the ones in Paradise, though. He would hate to take Becca out of one sort of ill treatment just to deposit her into another.
Time passed slowly inside the windowless storage room, and there was no place to sit. Eventually, he sat cross-legged in a corner. The dog curled up at his side with its head in his lap; Wolfe closed his eyes.
He roused to the sound of a padlock rattling at the door, and a moment later, the room was flooded with light. The sun must have come up while he was imprisoned—detained would be a nicer way to put it—and the sudden light made him wince in pain. He quickly slipped the welding goggles in place and felt immediately and immensely better.
“You can come out now. Sorry, but we had to make sure of you, Mr. Wolfe.”
Obviously, these people had been talking with Rebecca.
“My name is Adams,” the man said, extending his hand. “Bill Adams, or the Reverend William F. Adams, if you want to get formal about it.”
Adams was probably fifty or so, with bushy eyebrows and a very bad haircut. He wore shorts, a t-shirt, and Mexican peasant-style sandals that had been cut from a used tire. The sandals were not elegant, but they would do the job, and God knew there were more than enough truck and car tires lying about. Adams did not look like a pre-war preacher, but then, these were odd times and civilization had not yet adjusted to the world’s many changes.
“You used to be a preacher?” Wolfe asked.
“Not ‘used to be’.” Adams corrected. “I still am. If anything, these external circumstances have only served to strengthen my calling.”
“Are you the leader of the Regulators?” Wolfe asked.
Adams laughed. “There are no Regulators, Mr. Wolfe. Not to our minds, anyway. That is a name applied by our ‘neighbors’ so they can lump us together and view us as an enemy, or so I assume. Their leader, that woman—how shall I put this?—she is delusional. I mean that. She has visions of leading an empire. A small one, but an empire nonetheless. And I’m afraid in doing so she has become a very bad neighbor, indeed.”
“I can certainly agree with that.” Wolfe said.
Adams motioned for him to come out of the storage room. “Your things are where you put them. You can reclaim them whenever you wish.”
The rucksack looked untouched; Wolfe left it there. He did, however, retrieve the big bowie knife from the store counter where someone had put it. He felt a little better with that at his belt again.
“Come with me, please.” Adams led the way outside and then next door to the café. The blinds had been raised now and the door was unlocked. Rebecca was inside; so were more than a dozen men and women of varying ages and a handful of children who played in solemn silence at the back of the place. Wolfe joined Becca and took a chair at one of the café’s dozen or so tables.
“Are you all right?”
She smiled. “Oh, yes. I know most of these people. Some of them used to live in Tifton, before—you know. Before she took over everything. They spoke up for me this morning. They already knew a lot of what goes on over there.”
“They vouched for you and then you vouched for me, is that it?”
She nodded. “Yeah, kind of like that.”
The residents of Delaney came filing past and Wolfe stood to greet them, shaking hands and immediately forgetting the names that went with the faces. The children, he saw, remained isolated at the back, and there were sounds coming from the kitchen that suggested there were more people here than he had seen so far. Not that he minded. Just as long as these were not more of Mistress Alethia’s grey-shirted thugs, he was satisfied. When everyone present had introduced themselves, Bill Adams and another man joined Wolfe and Becca at the table.
“Becca has been filling us in on the plans to wipe us out,” the second man said.
“I’m sorry, but what was your name again?”
“Tom Hardesty.”
“Right, Tom. Did you say something about them wanting to wipe you out?”
“I’m not the one who said it.” Hardesty nodded toward Rebecca. “She did.”
Wolfe looked at her and raised an eyebrow.
“You didn’t know?” she asked.
“No, I never heard anything about that.”
“Well, I sure did. The men they sent to see me liked to talk about it. Some of them seemed really obsessed by the idea. They want to expand; bring windmills and pump the water from over here so they can raise more alfalfa and maybe some grain crops, oats, or milo. For the horses, you see. The leader says horses will be the base for nearly all wealth in the future.”
“She may be right about that, too,” Adams agreed. “She already has every horse that used to be in this county, and just about all the others around here, too. She had her people steal them: the hors
es, a few of the cattle, and every windmill they could spot. They came in with guns and took everything. Towers, mills, and all. Anyone who tried to stop them, they shot. Murdered is what I call it. They must have slaughtered upward of fifty people around here. That was before we learned we should all come together, so we could oppose them in numbers they would have to respect.”
“They’re like bullies anywhere,” Hardesty added. “Once we presented a united front, they pulled back. We hoped that was the end of it.”
“Have you tried to talk with them?” Wolfe asked.
“Once,” the preacher said. “Walter never came back.”
“He was executed,” Becca said. “Out at the dump, where I told you. I know the one who shot him. Shot him in the back of the head. He was proud of himself for doing that, he said. The leader gave him four extra nights at the motel. He…” she hesitated and lowered both her eyes and voice. “He spent all of them with me. That’s how I know.”
Adams reached out and laid a comforting hand on Becca’s wrist. Rebecca looked at the preacher and said, “Your friend’s name was Walter Sensibaugh, right?”
“Yes, exactly.”
The girl shuddered. “He was so proud of himself for doing what the leader wanted.”
“That woman may have been proud, but God takes notice of these things, too. Whoever he is, he’ll not escape punishment. Not in the long run.”
“The hell with the long run,” Hardesty said. “I’d like to see him get his comeuppance in this world.”
Adams gave him a sorrowful look and Hardesty looked away, but he did not retract what he’d said and his anger was apparent.
“What about this plan of theirs to add Delaney to Alethia’s empire?” Wolfe asked. “Do you know when they’ll be coming? And just as important, do they have any reason to realize that you know so much?”
Becca shook her head. “No date has been set exactly. They’re waiting for the leader to give the order, the ones I talked with. Listened to, is more like it. They said they’re ready to go at an hour’s notice. That’s all they knew. They said an hour’s notice. At least three or four of them used that same term: ‘hour’s notice’.”
“Did they say how they’ll come?”
“In the wagons. That’s probably why the hour’s delay. They’ll have to bring up all the wagons and enough horses to pull them, then get them all hitched. The men will get aboard the wagons and they will come down the road fast, with guns ready to cut right through Delaney and murder everyone here who won’t give allegiance to the leader.”
“Our allegiance is elsewhere,” the preacher said softly. “That is not negotiable.”
“Then you have to prepare to defend yourselves,” Wolfe said.
Adams sighed. “We have perhaps a dozen shotguns, and a handful of pistols, and rifles and very little ammunition for any of them. I doubt that a military confrontation will serve us well, yet I see no other choice. We will have to defend the town from these people whenever they choose to come.”
“Is there anyone here with military experience who could lead you? Police, retired Army or Marines, anyone like that at all?”
“No,” Hardesty said. “Not one. Are you?”
“Sorry, I don’t know any more than the stuff I’ve read in novels or seen in movies, but I don’t know. Let’s walk around and look things over. Maybe we can get some ideas.”
“You will help us?”
Staying here and involving himself in a war between Mistress Alethia’s Paradise thugs and the mild country folk of Delaney was a stupid, stupid thing for a stranger to do.
“Yes,” Wolfe heard himself say. “I’ll help if I can.”
Rebecca took his hand and squeezed it. Adams turned to Hardesty and said, “Get John and Andrew, please. They might have some thoughts to add, as well. Then we should all go and see if we can devise a war plan.” He gave a small, rueful smile and added, “David was no warrior, either, yet he defeated the giant. Remind me to use that for the theme of my next sermon, will you?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Entrapment,” Wolfe mused aloud.
“What was that you said?”
“Nothing, really, I… I was just—it’s silly of me, really.”
“Please. Tell us,” the preacher insisted.
“Yeah, well, I was thinking about a movie I saw once. I don’t remember what movie it was—some old western on TV—I guess I thought about it because Becca said the Paradise army will be coming in horse-drawn wagons, and it kind of…it kind of fit, if you see what I mean.”
Adams smiled. “No, I can’t say that I do understand quite yet. Go on.”
“Well, you see, over on this west end of town, there’s only the main street, the state highway or whatever it is. No side streets or anything until you get to that north-south highway over there. There are those dirt streets that run parallel to the east-west highway, and there’s the cross streets over on the east side of town past that road. But over on this end, there’s only the one road and it’s about—what, three blocks long? Or would be, if there were any cross streets to measure by.”
“Somethin’ like that, yes.”
“So, what I was thinking; you could block the alleys between the buildings around here—put up barricades, sort of, but you’d want to build them so they didn’t look like barricades. And that is where you’d want to put your fighters, in there behind the barricades. Then, after that—are you sure you want to listen to all this? I’m probably just being silly here, thinking about some old movie that I don’t even remember the name of.”
Adams smiled. “You are not being silly, and I do want to hear what you have to say. Mind, now, we might not take your advice, but we do want to hear it.”
“If you’re sure, then,” Wolfe took a deep breath and went on with the idea that he’d gotten from that movie. Darn, he wished he could remember what it had been, or even who starred in it. Audie Murphy, maybe. He really liked Audie Murphy. Now there was a fighter. They could use him, or somebody like him, here in Delaney.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“I’m sorry we have so little food to offer,” Reverend Adams apologized. They were gathered in the former café where there were enough tables and chairs to accommodate everyone. “We are out of very nearly everything.”
The meal consisted of a sort of multi-hued mush that might have been made from almost anything. It tasted like almost nothing. Its only virtues were that it was hot and filling.
“I thought I saw some grain crops outside town,” Wolfe said.
“More of a failing experiment than a crop, I’m afraid. We planted oats, barley, and corn this spring. The corn barely broke the surface before it withered and died. The oats were in the ground too late to do any good, or so I’m told. What you saw was the barley, and our farmers tell me they doubt the barley will make any yield to speak of.”
“Why’s that?” Rebecca asked. “It can’t be the weather or the soil. In Paradise, they’re able to grow grains.”
“Water,” Adams said. “We have wells, of course, from before civilization died. Some of the shallow wells still have mill towers, but the people over there came and took the windmills. If we had even a few of those mills back, we could pump enough water to irrigate a little land, grow some garden crops and have a community well for drinking and washing. As it is, we’ve jury-rigged some cisterns, but now even those are low, and we aren’t expecting any more rain until fall. We are thinking about trying to devise some sort of snow collection for winter. Really, though, many of us are beginning to believe we’ll not be able to hold out here much longer. If those people in Tifton—excuse me, please, but I can’t bring myself to think of it as Paradise. For me, that has a very different meaning than what those people offer. If they were smart, they would simply wait until next spring or so. We would all be forced to leave and they could take over Delaney without opposition, once it becomes a ghost town like all the others around here.”
“What happened to the pe
ople in all those places?” Wolfe asked.
“They walked away. Some said they would be going east where the Federal Command would take care of them, a few said they’d go to Canada or Mexico. How many of them survived and where they’ve gone, we just don’t know.”
“So Delaney will die, too?” Wolfe asked.
“Very likely.”
“Then why bother to oppose Alethia’s people at all? You could just give in to them, negotiate surrender terms, perhaps get them to outfit your people with food and water enough that they can reach the clear area, and turn themselves in to FEDCOM for help.”
“This is our home, Mr. Wolfe,” the preacher said. “We may be forced out of it, but we’ll not go willingly.” His expression hardened and he lifted his chin defiantly. “We’ll not go at the point of any man’s gun.”
Wolfe nodded. It was an attitude he could respect. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to find a place where I can get some sleep. We had a long night last night and a longer day today.”
Adams turned and motioned for a boy of perhaps twelve or thirteen to leave his seat and come to their table. The boy’s skin was loose and very slightly wrinkled. It took Wolfe a moment to realize why. He had been a plump child before the war. Now, all traces of baby fat were gone. Much longer, and he would look positively gaunt.
“Billy, I’d like you to take Mr. Wolfe down to Mrs. Wilcox’s house. No one’s living there, but I noticed the other day the door’s open. He can sleep there, I think.” To Wolfe he added, “Make yourself at home there, Mr. Wolfe. I don’t know what condition the bedding will be in, but at least you’ll be inside in the shade and no one will bother you there.”
“All right. Thank you,” he said.
“I want to stay here and visit a little longer,” Becca said. “There are some old friends I’d like to catch up with.”
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