by Ric Beard
“I get it now, boss,” the man said, nodding almost imperceptibly.
“Good!” The boss slapped the man’s knee and leaned back in his chair. Setting his eyes on him, he rubbed his chin with his thumb and finger. “What do you think, Justice Bradshaw? Should I give him a chance?”
“I don’t know, boss.” Bradshaw turned his head to look down at the tweaker. “Don’t think he’d make much good as an enforcer. Too scrawny. Can’t have tweakers moving powder, either.”
What the man sitting across from Sampson didn’t know was that the boss had once been a tweaker, himself. Ruby and Bradshaw had heard the stories enough times they might as well be stapled to their foreheads with the products of the paper mill down east.
Compared to the men Ruby serviced before Sampson took her in, the boss hadn’t really been what he called ‘clinical.’
Having been carried off to OK City by his immigrating parents when he was younger, back when General Plimpton led The Chain Army, the boy Sampson had grown up in what OK City people called the Industrial Zone. By the boss’s accounts, it was a filthy place, where one could actually see particles floating in the air from the tanneries, the steel foundry, and the other businesses that supported the big city’s war machine. The air hadn’t been the only thing dirty going on in that zone of the city either.
Green packs were what the packages of drugs handed out to laborers for a small stipend of their pay were called. The boss said the dosage was low enough so dependency, while prevalent, came with controllable symptoms. To hear the boss tell it, OK City government turned a blind eye in the interest of productivity and patriotism. Sampson, who’d spent those years with proclivities aimed more at books than labor, knew better. He maintained that the government was the one pushing the stuff. After a few years working in one of the helium distilleries that sent flying patrol machines into the air, the boss noticed his cravings for the drug were getting stronger. Didn’t take long for him to figure out the drugs getting handed out were getting stronger. That was when the boss, just over two years ago, heard that General Horace had fallen in another ill-fated run at the walls of Triangle City and saw a gap he could fill back home, using the same model he’d witnessed inside the city wall.
“Ruby?”
Ruby’s head jerked at the sound of her name. A host of thoughts zipped through her mind simultaneously before she blotted them out, considered the query, and answered. She eyed the rear of Filcher’s sweaty head as he sat with his back facing her.
“He doesn’t seem so bad off. Maybe you should set expectations if he doesn’t live up to it.”
Sampson snapped and one finger shot out. “Yes! Perfect. So, Mister…”
“Filcher.”
“Filcher,” Sampson said. “Right. Since you played your role for us and got me what I needed on this woman doctoring in Ripley, you’ve earned a place. You’ll start in the south, after a little training by Justice Bradshaw. That’s his territory. That okay, Justice?”
“For sure, boss.”
He didn’t sound enthusiastic to Ruby, but Bradshaw reserved his excitement for excuses to use the hand cannon.
“Good. So, Mister Filcher, here’s the deal I offer. You can refuse right now and walk away without bad feelings or obligations. Of course, you won’t talk about my part in the drugs. It’s all about appearances, right? Understand?”
She’d worked enough trading towns throughout the MidEast to know that business should be entered into from an equal footing to make it successful. It was a dangerous business and her clients were made aware of the rules when she recited the same script, every time, before they got near her bed. Ruby thought business should be tit-for-tat; she’d provide the tit, the payor, the tat.
In contrast to the earlier response by Bradshaw, Filcher’s nodding response was enthusiastic.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. You can work for me at the starting rate. You’ll report to the lead on one of my trucks after training. Do what you’re told, and you’ll advance if you do a good job.” He held up a finger. “But I have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to the shit. Snorting it, roasting it, and even boiling it so you can shoot it between your toes, is prohibited. The first time I get wind that you use, old Justice Bradshaw there is going to pay you a visit so that his can be the last face you see. Now isn’t that more likely to get you clean than some silly program a woman is running in Ripley?”
“Yes, boss.”
“Good. Now how about a little test?”
Filcher’s head tilted to one side as he sat up straighter in his chair. “Test?”
“Yes. A test. Since someone is in one of our towns, trying to sew a new seam contrary to our own into the MidEast restoration program, what do you think I ought to do with her?”
“Maybe tie her to a pole like old Horace would’ve?” the man said, his tone indicating humor. Ruby winced.
The boss fancied himself what he called ‘the evolved sort.’ You was either evolved or you wasn’t.
Were, she corrected herself. You were either evolved or you weren’t.
Evolved or not, the boss didn’t tie people to poles, not once of which Ruby was aware. She felt a smirk roll across her lips as the boss flicked an eye at her.
“What do you think, Miss Ruby?”
“I think you were more than fair, boss. Very civilized, the way you sent the boys and gave them the chance to come and have a chat.”
“Thank you, Ruby.”
“You’re welcome, boss. No, if there’s a chance they’re part of the killin’ of our lawkeepers, we need to get that information from them.” She made an effort to suppress her accent, the way the boss did. “I think maybe take them over to Augustus Raeford and let him have a look.”
“This is why Ruby is my advisor in the North,” Sampson said. He tapped a finger to his forehead. “She thinks things through.” Turning the tapping finger on the man seated across from him, he ticked up a nearly invisible, blonde eyebrow. “You’d do well to follow that example, Filcher.”
“Yes, sir, boss.”
“What of Lawkeeper Jones, Ruby?”
That was the rub. A time that would push Ruby’s life to the point of no return was coming, a time she’d been having nightmares about for months, and something told her the turncoat in Ripley was the harbinger of that change.
Anyone but Jonesy.
But he was one of hers and that meant something to the boss. His trip to visit Augustus and pay for his crimes was inevitable.
She couldn’t muster any enthusiasm in her tone as she answered. “An example has to be set for the town, boss.”
The smile crossing the boss’s face as he looked upon his star pupil was the same displayed from above as he’d stood in the truck bed that day he’d come to Ruby’s town, the day he left his lawkeeper behind as a gift to the people whose lives he’d planned to change. Knowing what Ripley held in store for her, Ruby couldn’t bring herself to return the smile. Instead, she nodded reverently and peered down at the hands she hadn’t realized had been bunching up the legs of her pants.
Chapter Nine
THEY'RE SCAVENGERS
9
From Sean’s perspective in the rear, the tracks beneath the Black Cat swiveled liquidly as the nimble vehicle slid around sinkholes segregating stretches of old-world highway from each other. It moved with the effortless grace of the animal for which it’d been named.
Moss had been vague about the origins of the vehicle, but Lucian’s description of the prototype Sasha had loaned him when she pulled him off a pole a hundred miles west of Triangle City, rang true. All Moss had chosen to say was that he’d managed to commandeer a few of the vehicles prior to his exodus from his previous home. Whatever its origins, it was a bad-ass piece of machinery.
Sean tailed the B.C. off the road and across a downslope circling the sinkhole to reacquaint with the broken road on the other side. As soon as his bike hovered across the median and onto the half-mud, half-degraded-asphalt
road, his thoughts returned to OK City.
He’d last seen the city from the doorway of a powerful woman’s stucco house, in a seedy neighborhood near the wall, after having been screwed by a business associate-and-fellow-smuggler, Carson. Forced to ride in the trunk of a different vehicle manufactured by Moss’s people, whoever the hell they were, Sean had maneuvered what he coined “The Beast” across 1200 miles of the poorly-labeled badlands, to Triangle City, meeting Jenna and Moss in the middle, near Tennessee.
A return to OK City felt like jumping back into the fire. Moss promised him they weren’t entering the city proper, but somehow, he wasn’t taking any comfort in assurances. Alexandra’s reach was wide. Last he’d been in the city, he’d been marked as a wanted man. Alexandra would have no reason to go to the trouble of changing that.
Moss’s plan sounded simple; they would track the truck, take it down on its return trip with the drugs in tow, and steal it. How exactly the mysterious man in black planned to pull this off, Sean had no idea, but his demeanor when Sean had asked about the plan had been all-smiles, like he didn’t have a care in the world. But simple plans had a way of becoming complicated in a hurry.
Why do I feel like he does shit like this all the time?
Sean tapped the throat mic sewn into a nylon mesh wrapped around his neck.
“Is the truck outside the city yet?”
There was a faint click as Moss tapped his mic. “You just asked me.”
“It’s been at least five minutes.”
The sigh he heard in response didn’t bother him.
“We’re not going inside the city. Focus on the road.”
A female voice filled Sean’s ears via Moss’s mic. “Lifeforms detected, Moss. Eleven o’clock, four-hundred-seventy yards.”
Sean tapped his SmartGlasses and selected the zoom feature.
“You see them?” Moss asked. The B.C. slowed its pace and the strange tracks turned 45 degrees to the left. Sean pulled to the side of the road to match its path. They came to a halt.
Though the zoom feature was pixel-free and clear, Sean squinted out of habit. There was a debris field in the distance and as his eyes traced it from east-to-west, he recognized its origins.
“Looks like a twister came through,” Sean muttered.
“Entirely too common around here,” Moss said. “See the guys down there?”
“Zoom four times,” Sean said. His eyes flicked around the debris and he spotted them. Four guys he could see. Then he peered at the third figure from the left and shook his head.
Scratch that, one female.
They were flipping debris, bending at the waist, surveying the earth.
“I probably know a couple of them,” Sean said.
“How’s that?” Moss asked.
“They’re scavengers. A lot of the gems I smuggled into OK City came from out here. There was a guy named Reyes who led a crew around the badlands in the neutral strip, between Horde and Chain territory, rifling through unoccupied houses, or what was left of them.”
“Makes sense. You make a lot of money as a gem smuggler?” He said ‘gem smuggler’ as if it were some kind of disease.
“Enough to get by. My last take was pretty huge, several rubies and diamonds. I could’ve lived well for quite a while if that Carson fucker hadn’t sold me out to the OK City authorities.”
“I know of this Carson. We’ve had our eyes on him for a while.”
“We’re really going to have to talk,” Sean said. “You seem to have your finger in a lot of honey pots.”
“Talk, we will. Business first.”
“Agreed. It doesn’t look like they’ve spotted us; we should move on. Scavs tend to get trigger-happy if they think someone is honing in on their territory.”
“Good to know.” The B.C. slid back into motion and accelerated, its engine only whispering with the effort.
At least there’s something you don’t know already.
“Radio tower on the right,” Moss said. “My readout says it’s active.”
“It can’t be one of Sampson’s this far out, can it?”
“No. Probably OK City’s. But we’re far enough west that it could be Horde.”
“They’re using radio now?”
“Roger. They’re doing a lot of things now that the towns out west have started falling in line. They’re building quite the civilization.”
“So they’re calming down?”
“Within the townships, yes, but they’re still territory-hungry. It’s a problem that’s going to have to be dealt with at some point.”
“Glad it’s not me dealing with it.”
“Keep telling yourself that if it helps you rest at night, Sean, but one way or the other, you’re going to be dealing with it. I tend to prefer the proactive approach.”
“I hope you have an army.”
The B.C. swiveled to the right to avoid a tire-sized rock in the road, probably tossed there by a tornado or washed out of the earth by flooding. Mud streaked the asphalt remnants sporadically as far as the eye could see.
“An army is an overstatement. I think doing more with less can be very effective strategy.”
“You sound like Jenna.”
Silence crept onto the line for a few moments before Moss replied. “You’re right. I do sound like Jenna.”
“I forgot how well you know her.” Sean peered to the left, seeking out the scavs and found them still hard at work, giving no indication they’d spotted the two vehicles cruising toward OK City. They rolled over a hill, and the four figures passed out of sight.
“Sometimes I wonder if we really knew each other at all.”
“She seems to think you did. Jenna talks about you all the time, like she misses you.”
“Or because I suddenly appeared before her friends in my real uniform and cast her mind into doubt about who I’d been all along.”
“I don’t think that’s it, Moss. Truth-be-told, I think she’d love to see you again. She’s just curious, and who could blame her.”
Moss changed the subject. “What do you make of this Sampson? Have you gathered much intel?”
“We wouldn’t be out here if we hadn’t. From what the townspeople have said, Sampson’s the charismatic sort. The other attribute they point out almost uniformly is his intelligence. One woman told us he speaks in such a way it seems like another language.”
“We’ve gotten the same,” Moss said. “You’d think the amped-up dialogue might alienate folks of simpler means, but I guess the charisma counteracts it. Funny how that attribute works on people.”
“You should’ve seen some of our old-world politicians. Slimy fuckers. What I’ve heard of Sampson tells me he’s just like them. I hear he’s from the MidEast but lived his formative years in OK City.”
“We never knew Sampson in OK City. How he’s done as much as he has in the short time since Horace’s army fell in Triangle City—thanks to you and Lexi, I might add—is a tribute to his intelligence. He’s not an adversary to be taken lightly.”
“On that much, I agree.”
“Have I said something with which you disagree, Sean? Can I correct any records?”
Sean shook his head, feeling the wind shift on his face. “No, nothing like that. It’s just an expression.”
“From the old world?”
“Yes.”
“I hope one day we can sit and talk about the old world.”
Images of corpses swinging from buildings, blood flowing down concrete gutters, and a flash of his prison cell flooded Sean’s mind. It was his turn to change the subject and return to more comfortable ground.
“I think the Sampson Law and Order Tour, and his ability to spread his lawkeeper spies throughout the region, are signs we should take him seriously. What he’s managed so far, with all the manned radio towers to push messages across the region, these sheriffs to keep people under control, the hunting, the mills—it’s pretty impressive.”
“But at a cost no one should
pay,” Moss grumbled.
“Now you really sound like Jenna.”
“Maybe that’s why we were such a good team.”
More images rushed into Sean’s brain: the dark circles beneath the swollen eyes of steel workers as they traversed the steam flooded, late-night streets in OK City en route to the dives littering the district, where twitching hands gripped mugs filled with alcoholic concoctions aimed at dampening the effects of the stimulants, in hopes of a few hours sleep.
“I’ll follow my sister wherever she goes as long as both of us are living,” Sean said. “But we have different reasons for being out here.”
“What’s Lexi’s reason?”
“I don’t know if you can call Lexi’s motivations, ‘reasons,’ per se. For her, it’s more instinctual. She has a hard on for bullies.”
“And you?”
“I don’t like the OK City system. It amounts to indentured servitude. Getting people hooked on drugs so they’ll work to pay for more drugs, is about as dirty as it comes. It’s too late to do anything for a city of that size, but if we can stop it from spreading through the MidEast, we should. I spent my early years hearing politicians claim it was patriotic to sacrifice one’s self for future generations. Now I realize it was just a ruse to distract people from their suffering. Besides, I don’t have anything better to do.”
“Again, we agree.” Moss said. The B.C. pulled an almost imperceptible maneuver to the right to avoid more road debris. It could hardly have been called a course correction. “If we accomplish our mission, we’ll have struck a blow toward that effort. Maybe we can get him to show his true stripes in a more public way, instead of stumbling upon bodies he hides when people cross him.”
“So we agree with my reasoning, but you haven’t told me your reason for being here. Is it ideological, or is there a longer game to be played for your mysterious people?”
“I detect sarcasm,” Moss said. “I understand it, though. My mysterious people left our home because we didn’t like the way our monastery leader was in cahoots with the government. Decisions were made that went against every foundation upon which we were built.”
