Second Solace

by Robert Clark

  Daddy?

  ‘Lead the way,’ I said with a smile, and followed her from the room. I could feel the wrapped blade pressing against my hip. For now, it would have to inconvenience me. I could adjust it later.

  We walked back down the same stairs Corser had hauled me up earlier, but instead of heading back into the courtroom, the young woman took me a different way. She pushed open a door to the right, and waited for me to go in first. Maddox Cage was there, as was Cecilia, and Rogue Santa. The three of them looked at me, Maddox with a smile, Rogue Santa with confused surprise, and Cecilia with pure hatred.

  ‘I see you’ve met my daughter,’ said Maddox before turning to address her. ‘Thank you, Gail, that will be all for now.’

  Gail gave me an encouraging smile, and closed the door behind me.

  All three looked at me, waiting for me to speak.

  ‘So,’ I said, looking at no one in particular. ‘Today’s been a bit weird, although not the first time I’ve been surprise-attacked by a stranger. You’d be amazed how much that happens, actually. For future reference, my safe word is Grapefruit. Just in case anyone else here tries to murder me.’

  ‘Do accept my apologies,’ Maddox said. ‘This is not how I like to conduct business. We built this place to be better than the outside world, but it would seem that the occasional mishap is unavoidable.’

  ‘If that’s what you define as a mishap, I’d hate to see what you’d call a fuck up.’

  Maddox smiled, albeit reluctantly, and sat down behind the large mahogany desk that occupied the main bulk of the room. If the place I’d been upstairs was a study, this was an office. A large oil painting hung on the wall behind his seat. It depicted a giant of a man, young and proud. It was Maddox himself, younger and brighter, but just as enormous as he was now.

  ‘Could you give us the room?’ Maddox asked.

  Without a word, both Rogue Santa and Cecilia left. As the door swung shut again, Maddox addressed me.

  ‘I had it commissioned shortly after this place was built,’ he said, looking up at his younger self, immortalised in oil. ‘I wanted it to stand as an effigy for all time. A symbol of progress to those who have yet to come. You know that old saying, “history is earned.” I believe in that statement. I believe people have gotten weak. We as a species have lost our grip on the top of the food chain. It comes from complacency. A sense of security. It’s a behavioural sink. I don’t like it.’

  ‘I suppose you don’t have much issue with it up here though,’ I said. ‘It’s quite the place you’ve got here.’

  ‘Have you heard that term before? “The behavioural sink?”’ Maddox asked. ‘It was coined by a man from Maryland by the name of John B. Calhoun. He studied the effects that overpopulation had on behaviour. He started with four pairs of mice, and put them together in this little utopian universe he had built. It wasn’t big. Just a nine foot square metal box with a few mesh tunnels leading out into small separate areas, but for the mice, it was more than enough. They didn’t need to worry about predators, or scavenging for food, or finding some place to sleep. It was an easy life for the mice, a safe life. A civilised life.’

  He got up from his desk and walked slowly around to look out of the window.

  ‘So, without the constant worry of survival, the mice were left with little to occupy their lives. And what do any living creatures on earth do when they’ve got time in abundance? They copulate. Naturally, the population grew rapidly, doubling every month or so for almost a year until it reached six hundred.’

  Maddox turned to look at me.

  ‘The population peaked there. It hit the pinnacle, and then dropped right off the charts. The last birth was around the six hundredth day. Between those three hundred days the structure of society just went to shit. That’s what Calhoun called the “behavioural sink”. The mice stopped looking after their young, the males that had once been dominant now struggled to defend their territories and females. That naturally left a void, which in turn made the females more aggressive, and led to more and more attacks which the males just weren’t defending.’

  I noticed he wasn’t blinking. He was like a machine, programmed to detail an old experiment.

  ‘At day six hundred, the population started to become extinct,’ Maddox continued, ‘the females ceased to reproduce, and the males withdrew completely. They chose not to fight or mate. Instead, they ate, drank, slept, and groomed themselves meticulously. Calhoun dubbed these males “the beautiful ones” due to their sleek, healthy coats and lack of scars. Their ideology had changed entirely.’

  Maddox walked back and sat behind his desk.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘Calhoun summarised from this experiment that when all available space is taken, and all social roles have been filled, the competition and stress experienced results in a total shit storm of society—my words, not his—and eventually the population just collapses. He described the outcome of his experiment as a metaphor for the fate of humanity. He said that once mankind had overcome the need to fight and survive, we would go the same way as his mice. Now, don’t you think that’s just atrocious? After all we as a species have been through, all the battles and hardships we have overcome, that we would just fade from existence like a dying candle in a storm.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘That is why we are here, James. That is why I have devoted my life to building this place, our Second Solace. I will not stand around and allow the human race to piss away millennia of survival. This is not just my fight, it is all of ours. And you see, this is why I was so curious to meet you. Regardless of your past, regardless of what you have done, you are one thing above all else. A survivor.’

  Maddox leaned forwards across his desk, staring intently at me. His eyes bore into my soul, searching for the truth. But then he leaned back in his chair and smiled.

  ‘Let me tell you a little about Second Solace. Named after a scrapped plan by NASA to colonise Mars. We started this place nearly thirty years ago. There were just eight of us. Much smaller back then. Without the manpower we have now, we practically lived out of tepees and collected rainwater from the leaves. It took a long time to grow to the numbers we have now and truly build this place into a symbol of power. Myself and Fenwick started work on this place straight away. We wanted to take the best of America and rebuild it here. We have more plans to expand, but they can wait for now. In fact, let me show you our grand town a little, yes?’

  ‘Lead the way,’ I said.

  We walked past the seething Cecilia guarding the door, and out into the cool morning breeze. Snowflakes drifted gently down from the sky, settling peacefully on the trees and rooftops.

  ‘I found this place as a young man,’ Maddox said. ‘Probably around your age, in fact. I used to come hiking with my father on the weekends. We stumbled across this very spot one long summer’s day after hours of hiking. We camped just behind those trees,’ he pointed at a spot off to my right. ‘You know, this place is practically impenetrable. We’ve got sheer rock walls to the east and west that only the best of climbers would dare traverse, and an enormous river canyon running down the south. We built the road up alongside it. One way in, one way out. That kind of deal. The track is tight and winding. Nothing gets up there without us knowing. To the north, we have our wall. There’s about thirty miles of untamed woodland and mountains between us and civilisation. We’ve got lookouts to both the north and the south 24/7.’

  ‘Not fond of guests?’ I asked.

  ‘Not fond of intruders. We have a careful process for people who want to join up. We’ve had a number of people who can talk the talk and walk the walk but in reality when you sit them down and show them the facts, you suddenly realise all that talk ain’t worth shit. So now we’re careful. We keep it controlled. We make sure that everyone who comes here knows precisely why we built this place.’

  ‘To survive.’

  ‘To continue the human race,’ he said. ‘By any means necessary.’

  He s
lapped his massive hand on my shoulder.

  ‘We’ll continue this later,’ he said. ‘As you can imagine, I have a lot to investigate. I can’t have my own men attacking people without my permission. For now I’m afraid you will have to wait in the cell. It’s a precautionary measure to protect you as much as my people. I’ll have Cecilia post a guard on you at all times as well for added measure.’

  ‘You think that’s wise?’ I asked. ‘Cecilia isn’t exactly routing for me.’

  Maddox laughed again.

  ‘Cecilia is alright,’ he said. ‘She won’t lay a finger on you. Well, she won’t so long as you don’t call her Cece. She hates that.’

  I made a mental note to only ever call her Cece from now on.

  ‘I’ll reconvene with you soon,’ Maddox said. ‘I’ll make sure you’re well-fed and hydrated while you’re here.’

  ‘And the trial?’ I asked.

  ‘The trial has been postponed indefinitely. Make no mistake, we will continue our discussion later, but you can rest easy for now. I know you didn’t orchestrate your own attempted murder, so at least you aren’t a suspect in that regard.’

  He laughed again and turned back towards the courthouse. Cece had followed at a distance. Maddox waved her over.

  ‘Cecilia, can you please escort Mr Stone back to the cell? Post a guard on him. They are to stay with him until I arrange some more suitable accommodation. Oh, and get the man something to eat.’

  She nodded and walked over to me.

  ‘Come with me,’ she said briskly. Maddox gave me another smile, and we parted ways. I followed Cece back down towards the settlement. The chaos of earlier had died off. Snow settled on the ground, creating a thin sheet of sparkling white across the land. I followed in the tiny footprints left by the angry woman.

  ‘I think we’ve got off on the wrong foot,’ I said. ‘You wanted to kill me, I called you a bitch, we both said things we didn’t mean. So let’s start over and maybe we can be best buds, yeah?’

  She ignored me.

  ‘Great,’ I continued. ‘Since we’ve buried the proverbial hatchet, we should come up with nicknames for each other, right? I could be J-dog, and you can be Cece!’

  I practically felt the repulsion roll over her. She stopped dead in her tracks and spun around to face me.

  ‘Call me that again and I’ll cut out your tongue, snake.’

  ‘Oh, come on, I thought we were past calling me snake,’ I said, savouring the moment. ‘I said Wolf, or—as mentioned—J-dog. If you won’t listen to me, I won’t listen to you.’

  Cece scoffed and turned back around. She stormed away in a hurry, I followed close behind. It was always fun poking the bear, even if the bear would quite happily rip the head off my shoulders.

  ‘Come on,’ I jeered. ‘Let’s not let a thing like this come between us. We were really bonding there.’

  She pulled out her walkie and barked an order into it without acknowledging me. We made it back to the hole in double time. I saw the guy who had pulled me out the last time. He watched us with disinterest, smoking a cigarette, and pulled aside the cover when we were close enough to ensure that only a minimal amount of snow would make it inside.

  ‘Back already?’ he mused when we arrived. He flicked aside his cigarette and held out his hand to me to help me down. I took a step forwards to reach him.

  ‘Hey, snake,’ Cece growled.

  I turned, but as I did, she darted forward and kicked me in the gut. I tumbled backwards into the hole, hit the ground with a sickening thud and gasped for air. My entire body throbbed with pain. I caught her satisfied smile as the guard heaved the cover back into place, and my world descended into darkness.

  I rolled over and slowly regained the ability to breathe. My old prison clothes were right where I had left them. I picked them up and folded them into a makeshift pillow. It helped enough to ease the headache a little, though I knew it was likely to last for hours at least.

  I pulled out the bullets from my shoe. I didn’t want to leave them on me. I used the blade to dig free a small chunk of the frozen earth from the wall, and drove each bullet into the softer mud behind. I left the tip slightly exposed in case I needed to retrieve it in the dark, then packed a little gathering of rocks on the ground about a foot to the right. I kept the blade with me, tucked into my shirt. I doubted anyone would investigate the hole, but if they did, I didn’t want to leave what might be an obvious sign to my treasures. As I pressed the third bullet into the dirt, I heard footsteps above, and quickly fell back onto my makeshift pillow.

  The cover was pulled back again to reveal two people. The first was Cece. She scowled down at me and held in her hand a silver tray. The second was the man I assumed had become my permanent bodyguard. He was a tall guy with a beard and hand tattoos that I only noticed because they were wrapped around a pump-action shotgun.

  I looked up at Cece.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry about earlier,’ I said to her. ‘I’m just tired and hungry, and all this is new to me. I’m still trying to adjust, and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. You get that, right? You can see… see.’ I couldn’t hide the smile.

  She fixed me with a look like she’d sucked all the colour out of some yellow snow.

  ‘Enjoy your meal, snake,’ she said, tipping the contents of the tray down into the hole. It splattered and mixed in with the dirt. It looked like some kind of thick soup. Chunks of potato floated lazily along in the hot, trickling liquid. But I had little time to observe them before the cover was thrown back into place.

  ‘You just had to antagonise her, didn’t you?’ grumbled the Wolf.

  Seven

  Hospitality

  It was a long time before someone finally came for me. Hours upon hours of lying around thinking about the mess I had gotten myself into, and wondering how on Earth I would ever get out of it. I scavenged what I could from the ruined soup. I had to. I needed sustenance. It had been over twenty-four hours since the sandwich Corser had offered, and even that had been a long time since any real food.

  I tried to sleep. My stomach growled from the meagre offering of dirty, cold potato, but there was nothing else I could do. I had to wait, and the best way to kill time was unconscious.

  But sleep was as lacking as my meal. I managed maybe a couple of minutes and awoke as cantankerous as I had in the boot of Corser’s car. I needed a proper bed, I needed proper shelter, and I needed a proper meal.

  The man with the shotgun pulled me out into a dark snowstorm. The ridiculous prison plimsolls had managed the world record in uselessness as the loose fabric soaked up the bitterly cold snow in just a matter of seconds. The numbing chill crept up through my toes, across my feet and into my ankles, which made the slow trudge back to the bizarre civilisation a tiresome experience.

  Shotgun Joe—as I decided to call my guard—said nothing. The moment he pulled me out, he flicked his head in gesture for me to follow, and we walked up towards the courthouse in silence.

  But as we reached the crossroads back into town, Shotgun Joe pushed straight on instead of right, and led me down into a new part of the settlement. It was quite similar to the rest of what I’d seen. The same wood had been used to construct the mass of buildings. The same gas lanterns lit up the interiors. The same curious onlookers peered through their windows out at the lone pair trudging through the snow.

  However this area seemed to be heavily residential. Gone were the taverns and corner shops of the main strip. Each house I passed had some semblance of personality. Little welcoming signs hung outside front doors with phrases like “there’s no place like home” or “home is where the heart is”. Some front porches featured swinging chairs or potted plants buried under an inch of snow. I could spot patterned curtains in first-floor windows. Dog bowls on front yards. Signs, post-boxes, everything that resembled a life outside of Second Solace.

  Through the snow I could make out a figure in the distance. A small person wrapped in a huge parka coat. A woman. She
waved as we approached and pulled back her hood. It was the girl from earlier. Gail.

  ‘Boy it sure is cold out tonight,’ she said to no one in particular. ‘Let’s go in, quick.’

  She trotted back over to the nearest house and swung the door open. There was a pair of pink wellies standing on either side of the door. Both were filled with dirt, and had a fake sunflower protruding happily out of the top. A smiley face adorned the area usually taken by the seeds.

  I hustled through the open door, shaking off the excess snow before I crossed the threshold and felt the immediate, welcoming heat of an open fire. Shotgun Joe was the last inside. He closed the door behind him and stood beside me.

  ‘Oh, your feet,’ gasped Gail, looking at my sodden plimsolls. ‘You must be freezing. Let me get you something dry to wear.’

  ‘I’ll be alright,’ I replied without really knowing why I was denying something I craved.

  ‘Nonsense. I’ll be two minutes. Go warm yourself by the fire.’

  That I didn’t object to. I kicked off my plimsolls and crossed over to the roaring fire. It felt amazing on my skin, like a warm, soothing, syrupy hug. I let the heat penetrate me, bringing me to a temperature I hadn’t felt since Florida. This time, however, it was welcomed. I savoured every second of it until Gail returned with a pair of hiking boots.

  ‘These were daddy’s old boots,’ she said, handing the boots over to me. ‘He was a size twelve. What are you?’

  ‘Ten and a half, in England sizes’ I replied. I held the boot to my foot. ‘But it’ll do the trick. Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ she said with a cute smile. ‘They were doing nothing in my closet. You might as well use them.’

  I put them on the ground beside me. No point wearing them indoors.

  ‘Can I get you some food?’ she asked the both of us. Shotgun Joe shook his head, but I nodded, and she danced away to the kitchen, full of joy. She was surprisingly bouncy for a survivalist. I expected them to be a little more dour and dismal, as had been shown from everyone else I’d met. But Gail was full of life.