Depending on how deep into their patrol they were, they may have been carrying quite a bit more at the outset of their journey. When she’d finished loading the supplies into their saddlebags, Lucy examined the bodies of the two men they’d killed. No identification, which wasn’t surprising. The white man had a tattoo of a bald eagle on his left forearm. Not terribly instructive.
It all begged a very important question.
Who were they?
Most folks didn’t see this much food in a month. These men were obviously part of a larger community, and a well-to-do one at that. Unlike anything they had encountered in the years since the Pulse.
While Lucy worked, Jack sat cross-legged across from the man, leveling his gun at his face. Typical Jack. He wanted their prisoner to know that they had stirred up a hornet’s nest, that not everyone out here in the big, scary world just rolled over. But the man sat stone still, looking off into the distance. He was a brawny looking fellow sporting a thick beard. His cheeks bore the gin blossoms of a man who had spent a lifetime enjoying the hooch. His eyes were a deep blue, set in a face dark and leathery from the sun.
When she’d finished securing their supplies, Lucy looped the reins of the horses together with a short length of rope; Jack blindfolded the man and secured his hands behind back with a pair of zip ties they carried in their supplies. They set the man in the wagon, stopping every little while to ensure the man’s bindings remained true. Jack drove the wagon, Lucy bringing up the rear to keep an eye on the prisoner. They left three of the horses behind; it was too complicated logistically. Jack would return the next day to retrieve them. They likely wouldn’t wander far.
They took a few detours to keep their prisoner geographically disoriented, reaching the outskirts of Promise as the sun touched the horizon. Lucy was exhausted, the stress and trauma of the day bleeding into her muscles, into her very core. It had been a long time since she’d seen live fire. In fact, it had only happened a few times since the Pulse. She’d forgotten how intense, terrifying, even a little exciting the experience could be. Her heart was still racing; she was alert, fired up. Eventually, her body would crash, and sleep would follow, but for now, there was work to be done.
They took him down to the dank, dark basement of the administration building. They had converted it into a holding cell several years earlier, adding steel bars and a heavy door they had stripped from the sheriff’s office in the nearby town of Maidens. To date, they’d only used it for drunks and domestic abusers; usually the two things went hand in hand. This was their first time using it for an outsider. They’d been fortunate in that respect. But as time went by, this kind of entanglement had probably been inevitable.
Word of the captive spread quickly, and the three members of Promise’s governing council met them at the door to the basement when they arrived with the prisoner in tow. She and Jack ignored them as they tended to the prisoner, escorting him down the outdoor steps and into the basement, the Council in tow. Candles threw dashing, flickering light; the inmate painted a ghastly silhouette against its cold stone walls.
Jack shoved the man inside the cell and locked it. He retreated to the corner of the cell and sat down, pulling his knees up to his chest. He seemed resigned to his fate, whatever it proved to be. After ensuring the cell was secure, she, Jack, and the Council members returned upstairs. Lucy lit a cigarette; it was homemade and harsh, but it granted her a brief moment of relief.
“So it’s true,” said Carol Ridyard, one of the Council members. She was young, a graduate student working on her dissertation at the time of the Pulse. But she was incredibly bright and worked nonstop in her role as one of Promise’s leaders.
“Indeed,” Lucy said, blowing a thin stream of smoke into the mist.
“Where’s he from?” asked Jon Schlosser, the second Council member.
“He isn’t talking yet,” Jack said. “But he will.”
Lucy hoped the man would talk before too long; Jack wasn’t afraid to take unusual steps to elicit information. He’d been an intelligence officer in the Army many years earlier. College had not been in the cards for Jack Goodwin, and so he had enlisted in the military. He scored highly on aptitude tests, drawing attention from a counterintelligence unit, a field in which he had thrived for several years. But the work had taken its toll, and his military career had come to an ignominious end when he had decked a superior officer who had caught Jack in bed with the man’s wife.
“Were there others?” she asked.
“Yes,” Lucy replied. “Two others. We took care of them. They were pretty well outfitted. If I had to guess, they were on a long-range patrol.”
A silence fell across the group. The prospect unnerved the Council as much as it bothered Lucy. They all worried about a new threat rising to undo all they had worked to build. It was always out there. While they worked to keep the gears of Promise turning, it was impossible to know what was happening outside their little bubble. News was scarce and often unreliable. Rumors, gossip, and myth came and went with the wind.
She had often lain awake worrying about such a threat. There was just no way to know when trouble would arrive on your doorstep. And that’s how it was these days. If your number was up, it was up.
That first night, they put two guards on him, one immediately outside the cell and one at the top of the basement stairs. Two of their strongest and most reliable men. Perhaps it was overkill, expending two men for guard duty, but the Council did not like taking chances. A single guard could be overpowered, tricked, taken in by a charming prisoner.
Twice a day, they fed the prisoner flatbread, a little salted meat, and some water, just enough to keep him going, but not enough to make him happy. He ate it robotically; he was not one of these types to throw it back in your face. He seemed to understand that displays of rebellion would hurt no one but him.
But for those first three days in captivity, he did not make a sound.
Lucy stopped by the kitchen on her way to meet Jack for a piece of the bread she had seen to that Sunday morning, smeared with a little jam. She’d been too busy to bake it herself, but it tasted damn good. It was chilly and dank, leading her to pull her jacket tightly around her body on the walk to the administration building. A light wind was blowing, making it feel even colder. She hoped the man would break soon; the more she thought about the ambush, the more worried she had become.
The irony of it all was that Lucy no longer suspected that coronavirus had been responsible for the respiratory illness that had sent her to the Falls in the first place. No additional cases appeared in the four days since the first patient had arrived at the clinic; both index patients were recovering rapidly. That had been the sneaky thing about coronavirus; it often looked like other far less severe illnesses. Terri had done a good job tracing the two ill patients’ contacts, eight in total, and all were self-quarantining in tents on the perimeter of their community. None of them were showing symptoms of illness; besides, there were worse things than fourteen days alone in a tent, excused from your chores, nothing to do but sit, sleep, and read.
Jack was already there when she arrived, sharing a smoke with the guard, Danny Bowen.
“Morning, Danny,” she said.
Danny nodded. He wasn’t much of a talker. He was a strapping guy, about thirty years old, well over six feet tall. He’d been a roofer before the Pulse, but as he liked to say, his favorite thing to do was drink and get into fights. But he was a skilled worker, and since joining Promise, he’d been instrumental in the constant maintenance work the community needed. He was fiercely loyal to Promise, which made him an easy choice to guard the prisoner. Jack dropped his cigarette to the ground and crushed it under his boot.
“Tired of waiting, Luce,” Jack said.
She’d been expecting this. Jack was ready to begin using enhanced interrogation techniques that he had honed during his time in the military. They needed the man to talk. They needed to know what he knew.
“Let’s see h
ow today goes,” she replied noncommittally. The idea of torture made her skin crawl. It was usually ineffective because most people did not know how to properly question a detainee. But even when the interrogator was skilled, as Jack was, it was awful. Most people broke quickly, and their intelligence was quickly corroborated. Every once in a while, you’d get someone who wouldn’t break. Someone who was cobbled together with steel and anger and purpose. True believers. The ones who didn’t break and ultimately suffered the most.
She suspected their captive might fall into the second category.
“I can only stay a little while,” she said.
When they got down to the basement, the captive was standing in the middle of his cell, as though he’d been expecting them. The guard, a middle-aged Colombian immigrant named Ernesto, was watching him like a hawk.
“He been behaving?” asked Jack.
“More or less,” Ernesto replied. He’d only been in the U.S. for a few years when the Pulse hit. He was one of Lucy’s favorite people in the community. His English was quite good but heavily accented.
“Put these on him,” Jack said, handing Ernesto a pair of zip ties.
“Turn around and put your hands through the bars,” ordered Jack.
The man didn’t comply immediately, instead taking the time to size Jack up. He tilted his head one way, then the other, as though to take the full measure of his adversary. Finally, he shrugged and complied with Jack’s instruction. Jack slapped the restraints on the man and pulled the cords taut. When the man was secure, Jack and Lucy entered the cell, each carrying a stool with them.
“Why don’t we try this again?” Lucy asked, taking a seat on the stool. “What’s your name?”
No response.
“Where are you from?”
Nothing.
“Why did you attack us?”
Silence.
“You obviously don’t need our supplies,” Lucy said. “So why did you do it?”
The man smiled. Jack punched the man in the gut. He didn’t put everything he had into it, but he did spice it with a little sauce. The man grunted in pain.
“I’m warning you,” Jack said. “I don’t know what kind of soft targets you’ve been hitting out there, but you don’t want to mess with us.”
The man turned his head and spat on the ground, then he smiled that shit-eating grin once more. But then he spoke.
“You have no idea what you’ve done,” the man said.
“Enlighten me,” replied Jack.
“My team and I are due back tonight,” he said. “When we don’t show up, they’ll move heaven and earth to find us.”
“It’s good to have friends,” Jack said. “So who’s this they you’re talking about? Maybe I want to get to know them.”
“Oh, they’ll find you soon enough,” he said. “You left more evidence than bin fucking Laden after 9/11.”
“Why don’t you tell me now and we can speed the process along?”
“I don’t want to ruin the surprise,” the man whispered.
Jack delivered a second blow to the man’s midsection, this one harder and direct to the kidneys. He would probably piss blood later. Lucy winced at the violence, wishing to hell it wasn’t necessary, understanding that sometimes it was. This was a brutal world they lived in. It demanded things of them that she had never dreamed of. Even in the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, people had looked out for each other. Food banks were stocked to overflowing. People had food on their tables, people had roofs over their heads. It was humanity’s last great display of unity.
Because then the lights had gone out, and they had stayed out. The aftermath had been terrible, and not just due to the battle for resources that sprung up in the wake of the Pulse. There was that nagging belief that the power would come back, that any moment, the lights would come back on and they could rebuild and move on. You started hearing things. A gust of wind could be a power line starting to hum again. And the world had gone dark in more ways than one. People went insane waiting, waiting, waiting for something that had never come. It wasn’t just the physical darkness, the absence of lamps and streetlights and traffic signals, and the blue light of laptops and phones and tablets. It was deeper than that, a darkness of the soul that had spread.
The man grimaced and grunted through the pain until his breathing stabilized.
“You can do whatever you want to me,” he said between shallow gasps. “I’m not saying another word.”
“We’ll see about that.”
She placed a hand on Jack’s forearm, a gentle touch designed to throttle him down. He flinched at first, but then his muscles relaxed. Sometimes, she knew exactly when and how to calm him down. The session had been extraordinarily productive, more so than she had expected. There was definitely a new threat out there.
“You’ve been very helpful.”
Lucy had seen enough for now. The narrow concourse outside the cell had started to brighten with the coming dawn. She needed to get to work.
5
The hanging was scheduled for midday.
Alexander hoped he could change his father’s mind before then.
He was sitting in the cafeteria, finishing his breakfast. Well, that wasn’t entirely accurate, as he had barely touched his food to begin with. His stomach was unsettled, and he was having a hard time catching his breath. Each of the few bites he had taken was threatening to make a reappearance. He was a tall boy, six feet tall, rangy, still growing as he neared adulthood. He was seventeen years old. Acne had done a number on him, and he’d developed a bad habit of picking at his pimples, leaving his face in perpetual relief.
Alexander had not slept a wink, tossing and turning all night. He normally slept like the dead; he worked hard all day, every day, as did everyone of able body in the Haven. But the place had been atwitter since lunchtime yesterday when a nice man named Oliver had been caught stealing a loaf of bread and four slices of salted meat. Alexander liked Oliver; he knew dozens of magic tricks that had enthralled Alexander many times over the years.
Oliver’s guilt was not in dispute. Over the past few weeks, the kitchen staff had noticed the bread and salted meat on hand was not matching the daily written inventory they kept. Suspecting that a thief was walking among them, they had set up a sting and caught Oliver red-handed. He readily admitted to the crime. A search of his room turned up half a pound of cured meat.
And there had been no question of Oliver’s ultimate punishment.
The penalty for theft in the Haven was death.
Alexander pushed back from the table and emptied the contents of his tray into the trash. Wasting food was frowned upon, but he didn’t care. Normally, he was a stickler for the rules and did not defy them for any reason. But this was too important.
It had been a long time since the last execution. At least two years. Alexander had borne witness to the sentence being carried out, as did all Haven residents over the age of ten. It had been a double execution, a man and woman carrying on in an adulterous affair. Adultery was another of the Haven’s many capital offenses. Alexander had watched with horrified interest, covering his eyes with his hand but keeping his fingers spread apart just so. The pair, Lilith and Sheldon, had swung from a large tree in a large hayfield about a quarter mile from the Haven. It was a medieval affair, the townsfolk escorting the condemned from cell to noose.
Initially, the then-fifteen-year-old had found it to be very exciting and just. These people had broken the rules, and if you broke the rules, they punished you. It was just how things worked. But watching the condemned prisoners stand helplessly on those wooden stools, the thick nooses lassoed around their necks, as his father had conducted the execution ceremony had profoundly affected him.
A burning desire to call out, to stop this terrible thing, had flooded his veins, but the cry died in his throat just as the hooded executioner kicked the stools out from under the trembling legs of the prisoners. The woman’s noose had worked flawlessly, snapping her neck
and instantly killing her. Sheldon’s noose, however, failed to sever his spinal cord, and he spent nearly five horrifying minutes thrashing and flailing as the rope slowly suffocated him, his eyes bulging so hard Alexander feared they would literally pop out of his skull. At one point, Alexander felt the man staring right at him, as though there was no one else standing around that giant, ancient oak, just the two of them. Staring at Alexander and judging him while the life ebbed out of him.
But he was almost eighteen now, nearly a man, and he had his own thoughts on things. Thoughts that diverged from those of his father. There was no need to execute this man for an offense that amounted to shoplifting. And he was going to let his father know about it.
He crossed the grounds, his mind focused on winning Oliver a commutation of his sentence. Of course, he had committed a crime, and he should be punished. But the punishment had to fit the crime. It had to be proportional. He had read that in a book from the library. A book about criminal justice reform. He loved to read and had often spent hours wandering the darkened library like a troubled spirit. The book had been sitting on a return cart, presumably placed there on the day of the Pulse and was still awaiting re-shelving five years later.
The Haven made its home at an abandoned golf resort. Firethorn Country Club sat atop nearly one hundred acres of once-pristine land. Before the Pulse, its championship course had drawn golfers from around the world and had been scheduled to host one of golf’s major championships that summer. For the past four years, however, it had been Alexander’s home. He lived with his father in the six-story resort hotel that served as the club’s centerpiece. Until recently, he had shared the penthouse with his old man; several months ago, his father had approved his request to move into his own suite one floor down.
Some five hundred people called the Haven home, many of whom had been with Alexander’s father since the early days. The ones closest to him, his top advisers, he’d known for years. Alexander did not know what his father had done for a living before the Pulse; any time Alexander asked him about it, he was cagey and evasive. Eventually, Alexander had come to understand that his father had spent much of his adult life on the wrong side of the law. He had stopped asking.
American Midnight | Book 2 | Nightfall Page 4
