by Glen Tate
Then Ryan yelled “Wounded woman in the kitchen,” and then “Kitchen clear!” Then he yelled, “Moving out the back door,” and Bobby yelled back, “Move!”
A few seconds later Ryan yelled, “House clear!”
Grant could relax. Kind of. He headed for the room Wes was in. “Moving toward you, Wes!” He yelled.
“Move!” Wes yelled. “I got a prisoner in here!” Then he heard a man arguing with Wes.
Grant heard Wes yelling, “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”
Grant came into the room, which looked like another bedroom, but there was so much crap strewn all over the place it was hard to tell. There was Wes near the doorway aiming his AR at a guy on his knees with his hands out to the sides. The guy was in his underwear. It was the man who had run out the back door, but had turned around and gone back inside.
Grant aimed his AR at the man and said, “Got him covered.”
Wes nodded. Wes slowly lowered his AR. He was in great shape and an AR is a light rifle, but his arms were getting tired from holding it up all that time at the guy. Wes could feel the adrenaline level lowering. He was starting to relax. He kept his AR in the general direction of the man, but didn’t have it shouldered.
Grant saw himself and Wes in the mirror in the bedroom. They both had about a week’s worth of beard. They looked like fighters, not the nice guys who went shooting together just a few months ago. They had a hardness, a seriousness to them. They were deadly serious and taking care of business. Those carefree nice guys were gone. They’d been replaced by fighters. Reluctant fighters.
Grant heard some people moving around. Ryan announced, “Getting a corpsman to the woman in the kitchen.” Ryan, the Marine, called a medic by the Marine term of “corpsman.” The woman was moaning and Tim was talking to her.
The man Grant was covering was interested in the woman’s condition.
“Josie!” the man yelled out. “You OK? Baby? Baby?”
Grant yelled, “Shut up!” He didn’t want them to be using some kind of code. He thought that was pretty unlikely, but still.
“Josie? Hey, baby!” the man yelled.
Wes was close to the man and said, “He said to shut up.”
The man looked up at Wes and said, “Fuck you.”
Wes kicked him in the face, hard, with his big boots. It knocked the man down, and Wes nearly lost his balance. The man started screaming. The situation was deteriorating rapidly.
Chapter 141
“I Doubt It”
(May 14)
“He said shut up! Now shut the hell up.” Wes reared his foot back to kick the man again, and he stopped screaming immediately.
“What’s going on?” Rich yelled from down the hall.
“Nothin’. Don’t worry,” Grant yelled back. He didn’t want Rich to be distracted.
Grant thought about the jeans on the floor in the little girl’s bedroom, the naked little girl who ran out, and this man in his underwear. He became furious and sick to his stomach. The man in Grant’s red-dot sight wasn’t a person. He was someone who needed to be shot. He was a piece of shit who had done an unspeakable thing and needed to pay.
Don’t do it, the outside thought said. OK, Grant thought. He started to think about proving this man did what Grant thought he’d done. Grant went into fact-finding mode. He thought for a second about how he’d get this dumbass to incriminate himself.
To try to be conversational and get an incriminating admission, Grant decided to talk to the man in street lingo. “Why don’t you got no pants on, bro?” Grant asked.
The man laughed. It was a frightening, almost demonic laugh.
“Read him his rights,” Rich said behind Grant. Hearing Rich startled Grant and Wes. Rich must have come into the room without them knowing. That was bad. Someone had snuck up on them, albeit a good guy. But still, someone had snuck up on them.
Wes asked, “What? His rights?” That sounded completely foreign: civilians don’t read people their rights.
Then Grant realized that Rich was right. “Yep,” Grant said. He remembered that he’d told everyone at the Grange that they’d handle crime control the constitutional way. Suspects, even this piece of shit, had a right against self-incrimination. Grant wanted to beat this child rapist to death, but he needed to be a good example for the rest of Pierce Point; an example of how the sheepdogs would be civilized when they got the wolves, and how the wolves would be dealt with in public after a fair trial. This was the first test of whether Pierce Point would be a mini-republic or a vigilante gang.
The man was lying on the floor, but started to rise. He got on his knees with his hands out. He had blood pouring out of his nose. It was crooked, presumably broken from that kick to the face from Wes.
“You guys cops?” the man asked, spitting the flowing blood out of his mouth. The man looked puzzled. No cops he knew of had a week’s worth of beard and wore civilian clothes. Besides, there were no more cops. That’s why the man had been having such a good time for the past couple weeks. It had been a party. The party of a lifetime. A party, the man knew, that had now come to an end.
Wes said, “No, we’re not cops. We’re…” Wes searched for the right word this guy would understand. “We’re Pierce Point constables. We’re, like, neighbors helping neighbors.” Wes tried not to chuckle at that. “Neighbors helping neighbors” sounded funny, but it was true.
The man was puzzled. “You cops?” he asked again. He was high. And stupid.
Grant said, “Consider us like cops. You will be put on trial. Anything you say can and will be used against you.”
The man stared. He was still confused.
Rich said, “That part about a right to an attorney might not apply. There are no attorneys out here.”
The man recognized Rich from around Pierce Point. He remembered that Rich was a former cop. “So you guys aren’t cops?” he asked.
“No, not officially,” Rich said. “But we will put you on trial so you don’t have to talk.”
The man started laughing. “I want my attorney,” he said, just like he’d done all the other times he had been arrested under the old system.
“There are no attorneys so, no, you can’t have one,” Grant replied. He couldn’t believe he was getting in a debate with this shit bag, so he decided to stop the debate.
“You can shut the fuck up, though,” Grant said. “I’d kinda like you to do that.” Grant, who normally didn’t talk that way, was trying to control the situation with language before he resorted to the AR he had pointed at the guy’s head.
He figured the guy had been read his rights so he could ask him some questions.
“So, are those your pants in the little girl’s bedroom?” Grant asked. Wes and Rich looked at each other. They were realizing what kind of person they were pointing their weapons at.
“Yeah,” the man said. “So what? Those are my pants. And I want them back. Right now,” he said. He started to stand up from his knees with his hands to the side.
“Stop!” Grant yelled, watching the man through his red-dot sight. “Stay down. We have some business now.”
Grant paused and asked, “Why were your pants on the floor of a kid’s room, and why did a little girl come running out of the house naked?”
The man laughed. He looked Grant straight in the eye and said, “What do you think, asshole?”
He laughed some more. It was that almost demonic laugh again.
Grant wanted to shoot him and actually thought about doing it. He started to think about the angle of the shot and whether any innocent people were in the path of the bullet. He started to think about clicking off the safety.
Then he got a hold of himself. He felt like saying, “That’s Judge Asshole to you,” but he didn’t. Let the guy confess. It would make the trial much quicker. Grant would technically need to take himself off this case since it wasn’t exactly OK to judge a case you were one of the arresting officers on. They would need a back-up judge, anyway. This would b
e his or her first case, so Grant could be a cop on this one. Except of course, he kept reminding himself, he wasn’t really a cop.
Wes looked at the man and then at Grant as if to say, “You gonna take this shit from him?”
Grant just stared at the man. He wanted an answer; a confession. He pretty much already had one but he wanted a golden one.
After a few seconds of silence, the man said to Grant, “Hey, asshole, I asked you a question. Why do think my pants were on the floor?”
Wes kicked him again, right in the neck. The man fell over and started coughing up blood.
Well, so much for the Constitution, Grant thought. It was impossible to be gentle in a situation like this. Grant wouldn’t be a hard ass about the Constitution, at least not right now.
After he recovered from the neck kick, the man gasped, “That’s police brutality.”
“No, asshole,” Grant said. “We’re not the police, so it’s not ‘police’ brutality. It’s just plain ole’ brutality.” Grant couldn’t resist. He walked up to the man and kicked him in the face. Hard. Really hard. It felt fantastic. What a release.
Rich ran up and grabbed Grant’s shoulder. “That’s enough,” he said. Rich was worried that Grant and Wes would beat the man to death, which was a valid concern. Grant could feel his leg going back for a second kick, but he stopped. Rich was right.
“So, I asked what your pants were doing on the floor in her bedroom,” Grant said. “Care to answer?”
At this point, the man was severely injured. Grant had broken his jaw. Blood was everywhere.
Rich looked at Grant as if to say, “Why did you do that?” Rich slowly shook his head.
Grant said, “We’ll let you think about the answer for a while.” He paused and then said, “Watch him, Wes.” Wes nodded.
Grant had to get out of that room before he beat the man to death. Seriously. He was saving the man’s life by leaving the room. Grant could increasingly feel what he wanted to do and that he needed to get out of the room before he did it.
Grant walked out of the room. Rich was waiting for him in the hall. As the two of them were going down the hall toward the kitchen, Rich whispered to Grant, “This is harder than it looks, isn’t it?” Grant kept walking. Yes, it is, he thought.
They saw Tim in the doorway between the hall and the kitchen patching up the woman in her underwear. “It’s not bad,” Tim said as they walked by.
“What the hell caused this puncture wound?” Tim asked. Grant pointed to the flash hider on the end of his rifle. Rich nodded as if to say, “Good thinking.” They went through the filthy kitchen, which smelled like rotting food, and into the back yard.
Bobby had the first man on the ground and in zip ties. Scotty had the first woman in zip ties, too.
The little girl was in a blanket. She wasn’t crying. She was just staring into space. One of the neighbor ladies was trying to help her. The little girl wouldn’t let anyone get near her. It was the saddest thing they had ever seen.
“You should see the front room,” Rich said. They went around the yard on the left side of the house and to the front. The front door was off the hinges and lying on the ground.
“What happened to this?” Grant asked.
“I kicked it in,” Rich said.
“How? I mean I tried that once and it didn’t budge,” Grant said.
“Where did you kick it?” Rich asked.
Grant pointed to where the door knob was. Rich shook his head and said, “No, man, the hinges. Kick the hinges. They’re the weakest point, especially on piece-of-shit doors like these.”
So that’s how they got in. Grant would ask Paul to make a metal battering ram with handles for the next time. They couldn’t count on having cheap doors at the next place.
When they walked in the front door, Grant saw a dead body slumped on the floor and up against a wall. It was a man, who Grant didn’t recognize. He was immediately relieved that the dead man wasn’t one of his guys.
Grant couldn’t take his eyes off the sight of the dead man. Dead bodies looked weird. Most people never see them. They look like a person, except that they’re dead, lifeless. You can see a thousand dead bodies on TV, but it’s different to see one in real life.
Grant became terrified. We’ve killed someone, he thought. Right or wrong, we’ve killed someone. He wondered if they would be prosecuted by the authorities, if there are any “authorities” left. But still. They just killed someone. Was this dead guy innocent? Were they justified in shooting him? It felt like they’d opened a big messy can of worms.
Finally, Grant snapped out of it. He noticed that Pow and Ryan were standing around the body.
Pow looked up at Grant. Pow nodded slowly. “He drew on me. Had to do it,” Pow said.
Ryan didn’t say anything. There was a strange tension between the two.
The dead man had his upper torso and lower neck torn apart. Blood was everywhere. Gallons, it seemed like, just like when Grant shot the looters. Grant saw parts of the man’s lungs and bones. He wanted to throw up, but it wasn’t so overpowering that he thought he might. It was more like a desire to throw up instead of an urge to do so. Grant was trying to keep it together so the guys didn’t see him wussing out. He gathered his thoughts.
He saw that whatever had killed the man had been very violent. It was like something had exploded in him and thrown him against the wall. He didn’t see a weapon anywhere near the man. There were two shotguns up against the wall, but on the other side of the room.
Things were calming down. The house slowly stopped seeming like a den of people trying to kill them and started to feel like a crime scene. They started looking at things. There were tools, generators, and gas cans everywhere. Guns, too, in every room. Tons of stolen property. One of the rooms seemed to be the store room and was full of all kinds of stolen items. At least they had the right house, Grant thought.
The cop in Rich started to kick in. “Secure all of them separately so they don’t talk to each other,” he said. “Zip tie any of them who aren’t already. Read each of them their rights. The guy with Wes already had his read. “Oh,” Rich said, looking disapprovingly at Grant, “the guy with Wes will need the EMT.”
Grant felt bad about his next thought, but thought it anyway. He wanted some of the residents to see this. He wanted them to see that the constables had solved a problem. It was politics. Not a “hey, look how great we are” kind of thing, but a “look what happens to people who rape and steal. There is law and order out here.” Grant needed an excuse to get people to come into the house and see this. As grisly as that was.
“At some point we’ll need to get people in here to identify their items,” Grant finally said. “We need to get the girl to someplace safe first.” They discussed having the neighbor lady take in the little girl, at least for the time being. Eventually they would need to find a permanent home for her. Poor little girl.
“Yeah,” Rich said, “we’ll have people come through and identify their things. Let’s go get their stories,” he said pointing toward the bad guys in the backyard.
After reading them their rights, the constables separately asked the woman and man in zip ties what had happened. The woman was Brittany and the man was Ronnie. They were boyfriend and girlfriend and both admitted to living in the house as guests and being meth addicts. They didn’t know how long they’d been there. They didn’t really ever sleep, so time blended together. It seemed like they’d been there since before the Collapse from what the constables could piece together.
The dead guy was Denny. He was a dealer and didn’t live there. He’d been trapped there when the Pierce Point gate went up and he couldn’t get back to Frederickson. Brittany and Ronnie didn’t know much about Denny.
The house belonged to “Frankie,” who was the guy that Wes was guarding. The woman in her underwear who Grant jabbed with his flash hider was “Josie.” She was Frankie’s girlfriend. The little girl was Crystal, Josie’s daughter. She was nine yea
rs old.
Brittany and Ronnie admitted to helping steal the things in the house. They dealt drugs, too, but that had pretty much stopped when the Collapse started. Supplies dried up and no one had gas to come out to Pierce Point and get product. They admitted to cooking meth in the house, which meant the house was contaminated with God knows what toxins.
Brittany started crying. She realized all the bad things she’d done. She was sorry. She wanted to get straight. No one said it, but they all knew that there was very little chance of her shaking off a meth addiction.
Ronnie was a loser; an idiot. He was still pretty aggressive. Even in the zip ties, he was talking shit and threatening the constables, but it was impossible to take him seriously. He was so pathetic. Besides, no one felt like beating a guy over stolen property. That wasn’t child rape.
Rich asked Brittany and Ronnie, separately, if they ever hurt anyone or saw anyone else do so. They hadn’t hurt anyone themselves, they said, but they both described Frankie’s repeated rapes of Crystal. The descriptions were horrifying. They were the kinds of things that shouldn’t be repeated.
Brittany and Ronnie told of what they had personally seen Frankie do, not what they’d heard he’d done. This was important because their firsthand accounts of what they’d seen were admissible evidence. Stories of things they’d heard, but not seen, were merely hearsay. If Brittany and Ronnie testified, they would have more than enough evidence on Frankie for child rape. Then there were also Frankie’s own admissions, but the beatings might make those admissions inadmissible into evidence. However, they had enough to convict Frankie, even without the admissions.
Apparently, Josie was involved in some of the rapes. She was at least in the room when they happened, Brittany and Ronnie both said. Once Ronnie had come into Crystal’s bedroom and seen both Frankie and Josie…doing something to Crystal that should not be repeated. That eye witness account was plenty to also convict Josie of child rape.
By now, Josie was patched up and had a blanket on her, too. She admitted to stealing some of the things, but denied that Frankie was hurting Crystal. “Frankie wouldn’t do that. He loves me,” Josie said. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Pathetic; it was absolutely pathetic.
