Nestor frowned as his stomach flopped and threatened to heave. “Why’d you kill them, then? Why not just let them pass, if you’re trying to tell me you weren’t hunting people for food.”
“We couldn’t just let them come to Adamstown, either,” Randy said. “Nothing for them to eat but us, and they would if they could. So we don’t just hold them off, we kill the shit out of them when they come through those woods.”
All of that made a certain sense, actually. Ruthless, and the cannibalism was a stomach-churner, but could Nestor say he’d do differently if the meat was already there and he was about to die from hunger? Probably not. He summarized, “And the raiding is both payback and to keep Ephrata from getting too brave about coming into your territory.”
“More or less,” Natalie said. “We’re not bad people, Nestor. Just not as lucky as those assholes west of us in their safe little farms. You don’t know how many of us died from starvation. Some still do. Adamstown is barely hanging on, and we can’t go anywhere but west to forage.”
Randy added, “It is what it is. So yeah, let’s not go back to Adamstown. And I don’t figure we’ll be welcome in Clanholme. So this wagon of food is great and all, but I think it’s just delaying the inevitable. We’re going to die, and everyone’s going to die, and then the world will belong to the rats and the cockroaches. People just haven’t figured that out yet. Maybe the rats and cockroaches will do a better job of it.”
Nestor, looking thoughtful, took another bite of rice and beans, the staple foods in the wagon. “I don’t think I care to go back, either. At least out here I’m free.” That wasn’t the whole truth, but it wasn’t a lie, either. “You know, it occurs to me that the ’vaders have all the supplies we need. What you don’t know about guerrilla fighting, I can teach it to anyone who feels like staying. I’d rather eat invader food than what you all were eating, and they have an army’s worth of it out there waiting to be taken.” At least, the Other could teach them all they needed to know…
And that meant it would be the Other doing the guerrilla stuff, not him, which made it an easy decision. At Clanholme he was a danger to all those good people. Out here, with these people who actually liked him, he was only a danger to the assholes invading the country and the people with him—Adamstown cannibals and raiders and collaborators.
Nestor almost smiled—he could use the darkness within him to fight the darkness out here, and maybe someday he could feel like he redeemed himself for all the gruesome things people said he’d done before the war. Maybe that was why he’d been cursed with this Other his whole life, though he didn’t know it until a few days ago—he was put here for this time, for this purpose, and the only thing that really mattered was what he chose to do with that dark curse now. And he felt ready, maybe for the first time in his life.
- 17 -
0745 HOURS - ZERO DAY +166
JUST BEFORE HEADING to breakfast, Cassy heard two brief blasts of the guard tower’s air horn. She frowned as she slid the supplies ledger back into its place on her bookshelf—two blasts meant the return of last night’s raiding party, and she never knew whether the news would be good or tragic when a party returned. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes briefly, then headed out the door to meet the incoming coalition fighters.
As she approached the guard tower, the fighters filed out from the Jungle, the Clan’s intensive gardening area when it wasn’t midwinter. Mueller led them, she saw, and her heart lurched at first, until she remembered that Michael hadn’t led last night’s raid.
Mueller saluted and grinned as they approached. So it would be good news after all. A wave of relief washed through her and she smiled back at the Marine.
“Good morning, ma’am,” he said, still grinning. “Got a whole squad of Rabs last night, and the ambush went perfectly. No surprises this time, except one on the way back. We lost the new guy, Nestor. We didn’t find his body, though, so there is a good chance he’s still alive. We’ll send out scouts to look around for him.”
Cassy frowned. “Maybe he ran off during the battle, or got wounded and crawled away before dying. Have the scouts search the area around the battle first to rule that out.”
Mueller then turned around toward the rest of his men coming out of the Jungle and waved at Sturm as she emerged. She nodded and headed toward them. She had company. Bound by the wrists, and with a makeshift hood from a Marine’s shemaugh, was a prisoner.
“That’s interesting,” Cassy said. “Is it a Rab?” She would chew their asses if it was, but knew they wouldn’t break the order to never again reveal Clanholme’s location to an invader.
“Nope. Adamstown scum,” Mueller replied. “Said he has a message for the Clan and then he requested asylum. Hope he brought his own food.”
Cassy didn’t respond right away, but understood the sentiment. Never mind that he was from an enemy group, food was getting scarce. The Clan had lots of grain, having squirreled away the rare silos of the stuff they had found and looted in the fall, but everything else was hard to come by. She had already decided to consult with Brickerville about putting up a greenhouse at Clanholme in the coming year, if they could find enough glass to make it practical, or maybe using reclaimed windows. For now, though… she shrugged. At least they were all fed.
Once Sturm got close enough, Cassy answered, “Take him to the Smoke House. You know where.”
Sturm stayed expressionless as she nodded and turned to go with the prisoner, grabbing a second Marine to go with her. The Smoke House would never again be used to preserve food, not with so much human blood and misery seeped into its very walls.
Cassy glanced at Mueller and then watched Sturm lead the prisoner away. Mueller was quiet, but then he was always the silent type. Finally, he said, “Well I better go get Michael. I’ll have a report to you before lunch, ma’am.”
Cassy nodded her consent. Mueller wasn’t happy about this situation, but neither was she. No one was. She had overheard Mueller talking to Sturm once about the questioning Michael had done there and knew that he understood the need even if he didn’t like it. Hopefully this guy was legit and really did have a message for the Clan. Otherwise, it would get very ugly for him until the truth came out or he died protecting it.
She was suddenly not very hungry, so instead of going to breakfast she went back to the house, grabbed her outer coat, and headed toward the Smoke House, far north of the Jungle. Almost to the food forest, even. Best to just get it over with instead of avoiding it. Nothing unpleasant got more pleasant by putting it off.
When she arrived, the prisoner was sitting on a rock, still hooded and tied at the wrists. Cassy said nothing, but waited for Michael to come along. The man shifted around in his seat, probably nervous. Who could blame him? She was curious to hear what he had to say, but she doubted it could be good news. Adamstown was a den of cannibals and raiders, had been from the early days of the collapse. The worst sort of human beings. She’d kill them all if she could. Someday she might just get that chance, and she looked forward to it.
A scuffle of dirt behind her told her Michael had arrived. He walked up behind her and touched her on the shoulder before approaching the prisoner. He nodded to Sturm, and she looked relieved at Michael’s arrival. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough, accompanied by the other guard. Only Michael and Cassy remained with the hooded man. He wasted no words or time before grabbing the hook and chain that hung from a pulley on the cross beam extending out from the front of the smokehouse, slid the hook under the rope binding the prisoner’s hands, and then went to pull on the chain. In moments the man was forced standing, just barely able to rest on his feet.
Michael paced in front of the man, making no effort to be silent but not speaking to him, either. She once asked him about why he did that, and he had said it was both to unnerve the prisoner and to steady his own nerves and prepare himself mentally to do the necessary.
The prisoner had no leverage to try anything and no way to escape from t
hat position. Yet he didn’t make a sound. That struck Cassy as odd, but she didn’t interfere. This was Michael’s place, not hers, and she’d leave if it got too uncomfortable for her.
Michael didn’t have that luxury, but he always did the needful and suffered the nightmares on his own time, the poor man. She would think less of him if she thought he enjoyed it.
She hoped he’d be compliant quickly because then the whole nightmare could stop—Michael was somehow a good interrogator and spotted truth when he saw it. People lied under that kind of questioning. Michael, however, had an uncanny ability to piece together different bits of truth to get at the big-picture truth—compliant or not, they always gave away their secrets in the end, to one degree or another.
Finally, just as she knew Michael intended, the prisoner broke the silence. “Listen, man, I really am just here looking for asylum, and I got a message for the Clan leader. I could just give you the message and you could pass it on, and maybe let me get something to eat. I’m not here to mess with you. I walked up and turned myself in. Really, man. Ask your guard.”
Michael didn’t respond. Instead, he slowly walked behind the man, boots crunching in the gravel, and then he stopped. He stood only inches behind the man, and Cassy could see that Michael was tense. He stayed silent for half a minute and then leaned forward to whisper in his ear, “Maybe you’re the food. That makes it hard to feed you, I think. I guess I could feed you your own foot. You’d live, and have a full stomach.”
Cassy felt a cold shiver of fear and loathing streak up her spine. The words were bad enough, but the way Michael said it was so… believable. Evil incarnate. Add one to the nightmare files.
In a more casual, chatty voice Michael continued, “Scum like you did that to a friend of mine, not so long ago. You didn’t know them, but I suppose one cannibal bandit is like the next, eh? We got sour cream to go with your foot. You’ll love it because we make our own sour cream, you know. It’s a great recipe, tangy and a bit thinner than what you used to buy in the store for your baked potatoes. Tell me that doesn’t sound delicious.”
Cassy had enough now and was about to leave when the man began to laugh. What the hell? It was not the expected response. Not a bit.
Michael’s jaw dropped for a moment, then he snapped it shut and stood stock-still, fists clenched at his sides. Cassy had never seen him surprised like that before, and as the man laughed himself out, Michael seemed frozen. This had probably never happened to him before, not in the Sandbox of endless Gulf war and not here.
The prisoner finally caught his breath and, panting, said, “Oh, man, sorry, I tried not to laugh—”
Michael snapped, “Are you out of your damn mind?” Then he snapped his fist forward, driving it into the man’s back. The prisoner’s legs buckled, and he screamed out in pain.
Cassy half-rose from her seat and then froze in shock. If that was a kidney shot… There weren’t any hospitals anymore. Then she reminded herself that this was an Adamstown man, a cannibal, a rapist, a bandit…
The man staggered to get his feet back under him and whimpered at the effort. “Dammit! You asshole! Why’d you do that, man,” he said, voice quivering. “I just laughed because everyone knows the Clan don’t eat people. Oh damn… My damn legs don’t work.”
Michael slapped the man on the back of his head. “Shut up. Don’t cry, it’ll embarrass me, and I don’t like to be embarrassed. You don’t know us. We could very well eat you. Cut you up and toss you in our forever stew, and no one would ever know you weren’t a deer.”
“No, you won’t. You guys are a bunch of selfish bastards, but you aren’t like them people at Adamstown. You’d kill me quick or skin me alive if you thought it’d help anything, but you wouldn’t do it for kicks, and you sure don’t eat long pig. Everyone knows that.”
“Everyone knows we’re selfish bastards?” Michael asked with narrowed eyes.
“That too, yeah. Look, Adamstown is just people, man. Not bogeymen, not trolls under the bridge. Just fucking people tryin’ to stay alive. If you and your friends hadn’t looted every damn inch of ground between here and Adamstown, we might not had to do what we done. It sure ain’t because we woke up one day and thought, gee, the cops are gone, let’s go get some McNeighbor Meals for the kids.”
Michael clenched his jaw, but to Cassy’s relief he didn’t hit him again. Not yet. She wasn’t sure why that was such a relief, but she found herself hoping this would take a sudden turn in a different direction. This wasn’t going the way she had thought it would.
“You still kill people for meat,” Michael said through tightly clenched teeth. “People who might have made it, except you figured your one life was worth more than all the people you ate to stay alive.”
“Fuck ‘worth,’ man, it’s just staying alive. Everyone will do what they got to, whether they’re worth it or not. You’re no different, you’re just luckier. And screw that other garbage, man, we don’t kill people for meat.”
Michael said, “Everyone knows that you do. I’ve seen the evidence myself—bodies with the meat carved off, the rest just left to rot.”
“I don’t know whose Kool-Aid you been drinking, or who you’re talking about, but it’s bullshit,” the man exclaimed. “Yeah, we didn’t let it go to waste when we got five-year-old little girls starving to death, not when there’s a perfectly good piece of meat just laying there bleeding out after they tried to come up on us. They attacked us and afterward, we chose not to starve. It was meat, and they weren’t using it anymore.” The man took a ragged breath and continued in a calmer tone. “You’d have done the same if your kids was starving. You make it sound like we set up ‘Free Meals Ahead’ signs along the roads or some shit to pack ’em in. We got attacked, we defended ourselves. Dammit, man, where the hell did you hear rumors like we were the same as them assholes in the red bandanas?”
Cassy stood suddenly and held her hand up to Michael to stop. This was getting nowhere and was besides the point. It had to end.
Michael took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. He gave Cassy one curt nod, then said, “We can discuss your diet later, if we decide to give you a trial instead of just killing you and fertilizing our forests with your corpse. You know what? I need to call you something. And since your name isn’t that important, I’m just going to call you ‘Fritz.’ You said you had a message, Fritz. Well, let’s hear it.”
Fritz paused for a couple seconds, and Cassy figured he was trying to collect his thoughts. The last couple of minutes had to have rattled him. Then he said, “Yeah, that’s why I found you guys and turned myself in to your patrol. Did you notice I didn’t fight? Just remember that I’m the messenger, not the message.”
“Perhaps. We’ll see. I do hope you convince me you are telling the truth. I have other things to do today than to pull your teeth out one by one, so please, let’s have it straight.”
Fritz nodded inside his hood. “Awesome. So, here’s the deal—Adamstown flipped.”
Michael looked down at the ground for a moment, then back up at Fritz. “What exactly does that mean, Fritz? You aren’t dazzling me with your message. You came all this way and went through all this, just to tell us they ‘flipped’? Like what, went crazy?”
“As far as I’m concerned they’re crazy, but no, man, I mean they changed sides. Decided to join the winning team and went ’vader. Aid and comfort to the enemy and all that. The whole nine yards. The whole damn town took a vote and it was, like, ten-to-one in favor. Anyone who voted against being traitors got the boot. I guess we’re lucky they didn’t just eat us. I mean, Jesus, if you’ll join the people who killed America, you’ll do any damn thing, so when they said get out, you’re damn right I got the hell out like my tail was on fire. Came right over to warn you, turned myself in like any good citizen.”
Cassy raised an eyebrow. That was actually pretty important news. She stood up—all the way, this time—and walked until she stood directly in front of Fritz. “I am Cassandra Shores,
” she said with a steady, strong voice. “I lead Clanholme, as you may know. And if what you just told us is true, we may not just kill you when this is all over.”
“It’s true. I swear,” he said, and Cassy caught a note of uneasiness there, something new. Perhaps her name carried such a reputation there that he feared it more than he did Michael. “I’d love to just be let go, because all this is your doing. Not ours. Not mine.”
Michael smacked Fritz in the back of his head again. “What does that mean, cannibal? I’d speak up if I were you.”
“I mean that the Clan and your whole damn alliance look after yourselves first and screw everyone else, right? You attacked their unit, killed a bunch of them. Freed their slaves. So they were on their way west, when—”
“Stop,” Cassy broke in. “Why were they going west, and how do you know what they were going to do?” Something about that statement had triggered her intuition. It was more important than this guy realized, maybe. “Everything you know about it, no matter how small.”
Cassy couldn’t see his face, but noticed his shoulders drew back. She hoped that meant he would bank on her leniency if it was good information.
“There’s some sort of group, like a new Republic or something, out of Indiana. The Rabs think they’re spreading fast and might be a threat soon, so they sent a unit out to spend the winter doing recon. Like, if they could attack now and nip it in the bud then they would, but if not, they were gonna spend the winter scouting all the stuff they could find out about this new group. We got a whole battalion in our own area, but they sent out two others, with each one going a different way. I think a battalion is like three companies or something—anyway it’s a lot of people with guns.”
Dark New World (Book 4): EMP Backdraft Page 27
