Brothers (The Last Colony Book 1)

by William R Hunt

  “Oh, some hours past,” the old woman answered with a careless flap of her hand. “But it means nothing. You won’t catch them—not on your own feet.”

  Not if we keep wasting our breath talking to you, Victor thought.

  “That remains to be seen,” he said, and began leading Jenny down the road again. He suspected he and Jenny were little more than curiosities to this old woman, and he had no interest in amusing her.

  She did not seem finished with the conversation, however. She shuffled in front of them with surprising speed.

  “Out of my way, old woman,” Victor warned.

  “So eager to leave.” She made a clucking sound with her tongue. “Won’t you stay for a bite? A sip of tea?”

  “Step aside.”

  She measured him carefully with her eyes. For a few moments Victor thought she was going to try to physically block him from passing her. Instead she stopped him another away.

  “You won’t catch them the way you’re going,” she began, “but I might just remember a shortcut. I would be happy to tell you, of course, if you would only stop by for a bite.” She clicked her teeth together and grinned, her eyes bouncing from Victor to Jenny, whose head was pressed against Victor’s ribcage.

  Victor felt the girl’s hand tighten within his. “No,” she whispered. “Let’s keep going, Vic. I don’t like this place.”

  Victor looked at Jenny, at the night darkening around them, at the child now chewing on one of Mr. Potato Head’s ears. He did not trust this woman, but he sensed she did in fact know something of the way ahead, and that knowledge alone might be worth the risk.

  “Tell me about this shortcut,” he said.

  Chapter 21: A Shortcut to What?

  Mother Max’s RV had long since left its road days in the dust. Now the once-luxurious mobile home was divided by hanging blankets into numerous compartments. Strange sighs and sobs rose from these hidden rooms. Once, when Victor stood still, a hand snaked out from beneath a blanket and fumbled with his shoelaces.

  “Don’t mind, don’t mind,” said Mother Max as she led them down this dark, almost subterranean hall. “They get fusty when new people come.” Victor supposed she meant feisty, but both descriptions were appropriate for the RV.

  Victor kept Jenny close as they followed the old woman. It was a comfort to have her beside him, even if he still hardly knew her. It gave him the sense that someone was on his side, that he was not all alone against whatever enemies they might have to face.

  As they reached the room at the front of the RV, Victor looked over his shoulder. A dozen pairs of eyes glowed in the darkness that was unrelenting but for the passing blaze of flashlights.

  “Coming?” Mother Max asked, holding the blanket aside.

  Her room comprised the gutted remains of the front of the RV. A small steel drum, equipped with a length of PVC pipe running through a hole in the ceiling, acted as a crude stove. Maybe that was the source of the overwhelmingly toxic smell that stung Victor’s nostrils. He lifted a hand to his face, unable to stifle a cough.

  Max frowned her disapproval. She stooped on crooked crab legs, reaching into a pile of oil-soaked rags heaped in front of the fire. She wadded one and tossed it into the mouth of the stove. Victor stared at the rags for a few moments before realizing they had once been children’s clothes.

  There was no place nearby to sit, and since a few cockroaches were patrolling the walls of the mobile home, Victor elected to stand where he was.

  The old woman lifted a pot resting on the stove and sniffed. “Thirsty?”

  Victor took a long breath and made a show of deciding. “No, that’s alright,” he answered. “We can’t stay long.”

  “You never stay long, none of you,” she said, pouring from the pot into a plastic cup. The liquid appeared to be a dark brown color, but it did not smell like coffee.

  “What about the girl?” she added.

  Jenny shifted beside Victor but said nothing.

  “What about her?” Victor said.

  “Does she want a drink?”

  “No, she’s fine.”

  Max’s eyes snapped upward. “The girl can speak for herself.” Then her voice grew tender, almost fawning, as she cocked her head at Jenny. “What do you say, little girl? Want Mother Max to fix you something nice? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  Victor tried to hold Jenny close, but she pulled away and stood beside him. “No thank you, ma’am,” she answered.

  Max’s jaw worked back and forth. She shuffled to a pillow lying on the floor, bent her long knees in front of her, and cradled the cup between her hands. “Well, then, what is it you want with these Reapers?”

  Victor could not tell whether she was forgetting what he had already told her, or if she was testing him to see whether he would give her a different reason the second time. He lowered his hand where it could not be seen and clenched it as hard as he could. “They took someone from me, someone I care about a great deal.”

  “They take many people,” she answered.

  “Do they take people from you?”

  “From Junkers?” She laughed—a harsh sound like crumpled wax paper. Then the humor drained from her face. “Sometimes, if the child is not careful. But mostly we trade—that sates their appetite.”

  “Appetite?” Victor repeated. Dear God, please don’t mean what I think you mean.

  She nodded. “They are always hungry, always greedy. But we find things from one place, they from another, and the peace stands.”

  Victor wondered what this “peace” was. Did this Baron try to make peace with every group he came into contact with? If so, he might be wise to have more reasonable representative than kidnappers on horseback. Then again, perhaps he wanted everyone to understand the danger of not taking him seriously.

  Victor decided they had wandered too far afield already, so he did not inquire further about any settlement that might have been made between the Junkers and the horsemen. “Have you seen them recently?” he said.

  “Oh, yes. Just this morning. They were in quite a hurry.”

  “They’re going to Rayburn, aren’t they?”

  Mother Max did not answer.

  “I must know,” Victor insisted, ignoring the sounds of footsteps in the RV’s “hall,” the vibrations beneath his feet. “I can’t leave here without knowing. Where are they going, Max?”

  She leaned toward him. “They might as well be going to hell, because it is a place you cannot follow them. Those who enter do not return.”

  The footsteps in the RV had stopped, but now Victor heard a murmur of voices. It sounded as if the trailer were buzzing with flying insects. Where do insects gather, he thought, except around a corpse? He glanced at the driver’s side door of the RV. The passenger door was blocked with a heap of junk, but the other one appeared usable. Even if it was locked, he thought he could kick it open.

  “Why don’t you fight them?” he asked.

  Her eyes, focused on some distant unseen, widened in fear. “Because we’re alive,” she whispered. “And the living must keep living.”

  “You tried fighting them? What happened?”

  She blinked, breaking the spell, and shook her head. “No more talk of them.”

  The murmur of voices was growing louder. In his peripheral vision, Victor saw the shapes of limbs pressing against the hanging blanket. Jenny recoiled beside him.

  “You promised to tell me about a shortcut,” he said, raising his voice above the noise. “Please, it’s my only chance of saving my brother!”

  Maybe it was the mention of family, or maybe it was simply the tone of his voice. Max made a brief shushing sound, and all at once the murmuring fell silent. The blanket hung limp again, drifting a little with phantom disturbance.

  “They have your brother?” she said.

  Victor nodded.

  She pursed her wrinkled lips together. “There may be a way to save him. If there’s still time.”

  _____

&nbs
p; They followed the old woman as she wove among the huts of the Junkers. The others kept a respectful distance from Mother Max, but strained toward Victor and Jenny. Victor quickly realized their best bet was to keep close behind their guide.

  With his heart beating at a heightened clip, it seemed to take half an hour for them to reach the end of the Junker’s “village.” Victor could feel the ground beginning to slope downward beneath them as they passed the last few huts.

  Max pointed across the darkness as stars poked through overhead. “They’re well ahead of you,” she said, as if Victor could see the horsemen in the darkness. “If you want to catch them, you’ll have to make good time.”

  “Just tell me about this shortcut,” he answered.

  Max stooped and began drawing in the dirt at their feet. She drew a straight line, indicating the highway they were on, and then added a semi-circle beside it. Both lines, the highway and the detour, terminated at an X that Victor assumed to be the city of Rayburn.

  “They leave the highway before it reaches the city,” she said.

  The quickest way to get to Rayburn, Victor knew, would be to continue following the highway, which was why it made so little to think the horsemen would leave it.

  “Why would they do that?” he asked, feeling the first doubt that perhaps Rayburn was not their destination at all.

  She shrugged, still contemplating her drawing. “In the daylight you can see the cars blocking the road. Maybe it is a bad way for their horses.” She straightened and turned to face him. “I know someone who may still live there. Her name is Ellen. She will help you, if you can find her. Tell her Max sent you—she’ll remember me, I’m sure.”

  Victor nodded. “This road—how much of a shortcut is it?”

  She smiled. “A good one.”

  Victor looked at the road. In the daytime, he might have seen where the horsemen took their detour. He might have seen the road descending below him and stretching all the way to the city in the distance. He might even have seen his brother.

  “What’s really down there?” he asked her.

  She studied him closely. “The dead are down there. Lots of dead. But we don’t go down there any more—not the Junkers. We leave the dead alone.”

  Victor searched for some telltale sign to betray what she was hiding, but he could not read her. Maybe she was right about the horsemen, maybe not. Maybe the highway was the detour and would actually cause them to lose time. The idea that this old crone would deliberately help the horsemen, however, seemed implausible to Victor. They did not seem to make friends very easily.

  And if this is a trap, he thought, then so be it. His trigger finger was already getting itchy again.

  “Okay,” he said slowly, mentally preparing himself for what he hoped would prove the last leg of the journey. “I’ll look for this Ellen you mentioned. If I find her—” He meant to say, I’ll mention you to her, but just then, as he glanced back at Max, a cockroach crawled across her jaw.

  Part 3: A Dance with the Devil

  Chapter 22: The Great and Powerful

  If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it - Cormac McCarthy, The Road

  Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight? - The Joker

  Oswald Crumley, thirty years old and standing at a middling 5’10”, rolled the pair of closet doors back on unseen, but well-oiled, tracks. He was naked. The flesh on his arms was standing in goosebumps from the cold bath. He looked down at his stomach, a round paunch that had just recently begun to overhang his belt. He was getting soft. That was the price of good eating, he supposed. Gone were the days of low-calorie diets, artificial sweeteners, and fitness videos. Society, once infatuated with actresses so thin they could have played inmates in a concentration camp, was now reverting to the old standards of the world, where obesity was not a sign of a lack of self-discipline, but of power.

  Oswald breathed deeply of the closet air. The heavy odor of sweat was there, true, but that was only one smell in a melody of scents—gasoline, aftershave, citrus, lavender, chamomile, even baby powder. Each smell carried its own collection of memories. Oswald closed his eyes, seeing the old faces and hearing the old voices, some going back as far as a few years. He had never washed any of these clothes. That was okay, because he rarely wore the same set of clothes twice. Some of them were women’s clothes, but of course he never wore those. He was not a freak, after all.

  In deference to the season, he selected a pair of rugged jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt. The jeans appeared to be the kind that came with holes already worn through the knees. It amused him to think how people had been so happy to pay for less—less sugar in their drinks, fewer calories in their meals, holes worn right into their clothes. Still, he liked the way the jeans looked on him. They had a “survivor” look to them. He could have been an extra on the set of The Walking Dead—a show he had once loved, except for their departures into melodrama. The characters had a nasty habit of talking too much.

  He added a pair of cowboy boots to his outfit (cushioned by wool socks, since the boots didn’t fit properly), and finished it all off with a sandstone-colored hoodie with a zipper in the front. He studied himself in the mirror. Yes, he looked rugged for sure. It was the “casual survivor” appearance, a look that said, I’m roughing it, but I have some idea what I’m doing.

  Next he tested his smile. Some days the smile worked, some days it didn’t. The trick was to smile with your eyes. If you could feel the smile, it was probably convincing. And the best way he’d found to feel a smile was to think as many positive things about the other person as possible. He would tell himself how wonderful that person was, how happy he was to see that person, how barren a place the world would be without that person.

  Most of the time, he thought, he was convincing. But it was always difficult to tell. Sometimes he would think he had succeeded until the other person averted their eyes or cleared their throat a certain way, and then he would know they had seen past the smile.

  But most of the time they believed the smile.

  Oswald closed the closet and crossed the second-floor room to the front window, his boots making a satisfying knocking sound on the floor. It made him feel like a cowboy in an old Western, and as he looked through the window at the street running through the middle of the town (My own little Mayberry, he thought), he imagined seeing a posse of riders thundering from the distance, trailed by a cloud of dust. Oswald, the lawman in this momentary fiction, would raise the window and rest his rifle on the sill, and then he would pick the riders off one at a time, not bothering to warn them first. This was his town, after all—or would be soon enough.

  But no riders came thundering from the distance. The street was quiet, the houses lining the street were quiet, nothing moved except the pigeons that lived in the courthouse a few blocks down. The past few weeks had been too quiet, causing some to suggest it was time to pack up and get out of Dodge. But for reasons he did not understand (call it intuition, if you will), Oswald sensed this day was going to be different.

  He walked downstairs with a smile on his face.

  _____

  The first floor of the building was a butchery—not just any butchery, but the town butchery. The family butchery. As Oswald entered through the back door, he passed a portrait of Granddad Arnie, who had kicked the can about ten years back. They’d found him in the yard, not far from the headless chicken he’d been chasing, dead from a stroke.

  Old Arnie. What a class act.

  After that, the business was passed down to Arnie’s son, Reginald. Once Reginald’s time came, the business would be given to Oswald, and so on and so forth (assuming, of course, Oswald ever fathered sons of his own—the dating pool was quite small). But Reginald, though on the cusp of sixty years, showed no signs of relinquishing his post or even slowing down. He was as steadfast as the cuckoo clock hanging on the back wall of the shop—even more steadfast, in fact, because Oswald had r
emoved the batteries for another purpose.

  Oswald poured himself a cup of barley tea from a pitcher, making sure to return the pitcher to the table where he had found it. They never left anything on the counter, because the counter was reserved for the customer. It had always been that way and always would.

  He took the tea without sugar, even though a shipment including a few sugar packets had arrived just recently. He sipped the unsweetened tea. It was rich and only slightly bitter, and as the steam rose around his face and the warmth surrounded his carefully-cleaned teeth, he imagined the anticipation of opening the shop by himself. He could see the crowd of hungry customers gathered in the street, some pressing their faces to the glass just for the chance to glimpse the delicacies inside. The tables would fill up (they would always be full if he was in charge), a queue would go out the door and all the way to the end of the block, and the smell of meat would prove so irresistible they would practically beg him to take their money.