Melt (Book 8): Hold

by Pike, JJ

  Some idiot had gone off-script and continued to fire long after the warning shots had stopped. It was not to be tolerated.

  Jacinta Baule, Alistair’s right hand, get-it-done gal, relayed the command down the line. “Tell that moron to stop firing. Stat.”

  Some poor schlub, new to Wolfjaw and its ways, was going to get a good whupping when they got back to base. If it turned out the shooter had used more than his allotted number of bullets, he’d be marched to the stocks and left there for a week. When Alistair pronounced judgment, the punishment was meted out swiftly. Naturally, if there was a solid reason for the use of excess bullets, he’d want to hear it. But if it was merely machismo gone mad, there’d be a reckoning.

  That was a lot of ‘ifs’.

  Alistair had already labeled the shooter “an idiot”. Once Alistair said you were an idiot, you were an idiot until proven otherwise, times a thousand. That moniker would stick through all the ifs and only be lifted once the shooter was cleared of all wrongdoing.

  Note to self: Move stocks and pillory underground. No. Scratch that. Build pranger, instead. It will take up less room.

  The firing stopped.

  Finally.

  The trees were quiet, the breeze barely lifting the leaves to whisper their secrets out loud. That there were 32 men and 4 women surrounding a military convoy on the outskirts of a small town in the Adirondacks was known to no one but Alistair, his crew, and the birds.

  The soldiers on the road below—running around like ants, pulling their injured comrade to safety—only knew that they’d been ambushed. They didn’t know by whom or why. Nor that they were outnumbered, outgunned, outclassed, and about to be stripped of all their worldly possessions.

  Alistair put his scope back up to his dominant eye. The T5Xi-5 was a marvel of engineering. The diopter, reticule, and parallax settings gave him the kind of control he wanted throughout his life. If he’d been a religious man, he’d have sent up a word of thanks for the precision it offered.

  Instead, he grunted.

  It was barely a noise. More of a brief passage of air over his vocal chords. He needed a moment to compose himself. Josephine Morgan was standing on the roof of an army truck on the road below, streamers in her hands, screaming something they couldn’t hear.

  Josephine Morgan, their itinerant grade school teacher. What in the name of all that was holy was she doing with the Army? It was all he could do to keep his breathing even and his temper tamped down. He handed his rifle to Jacinta.

  “What? What is it?” Jacinta took the proffered rifle and stared down the scope. “Hot damn.”

  He had to concentrate his energy on something other than Josephine. He could not allow his voice to betray his feelings. Fortunately for him, there was a problem large enough to blot out his feelings of surprise that his favorite outsider was consorting with the enemy. One of his own men had shot a soldier. That grounded him in the present. It was a real problem which required real leadership. The Josephine question could, and would, wait. “You see what they’re dragging? The body? On the ground?”

  Jacinta nodded.

  “Find who took that shot and bring them to me.”

  “Consider it done, boss.”

  “Tell squadrons two and three to reposition. Squads one and four should stay in place. I want this convoy covered, with two and three ready to move in on my signal. The orders remain the same. No one fires without my say-so. I mean that literally, Jacinta. I’m going to hold you personally responsible if another bullet hits another body. Understood?”

  Jacinta gave a single nod, her eyes steely and serious, her shoulders up a notch. She relayed the fallback orders to her second in command who whispered them to his and on until a group of snipers slid down from their perches, melted back into the tree line, only to emerge, slithering on their bellies in the long grass below. Jacinta was the consummate professional; none of them—not even the people who knew her well—would have guessed Alistair had put the fear of God into her.

  “It’s her, isn’t it?” she said. “Not the body on the ground, but the other one. On the roof of the truck. It’s her.”

  Alistair nodded.

  “Do you want me to take her down?”

  Alistair looked over his left shoulder at Jacinta. He didn’t frown. He didn’t need to. The look, sharp, short, cold, said it all.

  “Because she’s still useful?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I got it. Before. I got why you humored her—allowed her to move among us, gave her liberties no one else is allowed—but it’s different now. She’s with soldiers. She’s a…” Jacinta struggled to find the right word but eventually gave up. She wouldn’t dare call Josephine a turncoat or a snitch. Not without Alistair’s blessing and certainly not without evidence. Josephine was his pet project and was, as a direct result, protected. “We can’t let the soldiers know where we’re at. Wolfjaw remains a secret. Right?”

  “Enough talking.”

  Jacinta’s mouth closed with a snap.

  “You have your orders.” He turned back to the scene unfolding on the road below. “Whoever shot that soldier will look me in the eye and tell me why.”

  Jacinta nodded. If she had a question it didn’t pass her lips. Alistair had no interest in her personal struggle with the rules. They were there for a reason. He maintained order through discipline. She could like it or leave. Her choice.

  Jacinta handed back Alistair’s rifle.

  “Find Herb and send him to me.”

  Alistair’s second-in-command scrambled down the embankment in search of the offending shooter as well as Herb.

  Alistair returned the scope to his eye and watched Josephine Morgan waving white streamers over her head, shouting the same phrase over and over. He couldn’t hear her. He watched her lips carefully. “We surrender,” she said. “We surrender.”

  What a strange creature. She should have known better. She’d been visiting Wolfjaw for long enough to understand their standard operating procedures. He wanted the military equipment, not the personnel.

  Then again, perhaps she thought it wasn’t them who’d opened fire?

  There was a body on the ground. That wasn’t their SOP. Could be that she took them for looters or street fighters or opportunists who’d taken to the roads in troubled times. She had to have known he’d never personally have allowed one of his men to take down an enemy combatant. Not without provocation. Or warning. Alistair was a man of honor. Wolfjaw had been fashioned around his code of ethics. She had to think it was someone else shooting at her convoy.

  He looked again. So many vehicles. That meant supplies, maybe weapons. But also, soldiers.

  It was going to take some fancy tactics to get the hardware to Wolfjaw without more bloodshed. He couldn’t do what he normally did: divide and conquer, send those who didn’t want to join them on their way and invite the rest to come to Nirvana with him. No way those army boys would want to join Wolfjaw. They’d have to be sent packing without the usual offers of food and shelter.

  He paused.

  Jacinta was right about one thing: it was different now. The world had changed. The central government—the so-called president, vice-president and cabinet—had absconded, as he’d always said they would. First sign of real trouble and they take their fat-cat asses out of the line of fire to “a place of safety”. Didn’t look like any kind of leadership he was interested in. With that change in the political landscape it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the soldiers might be interested in a better life with the good people of Wolfjaw.

  Herb struggled up the embankment—crawling elbow over elbow so no one on the road would spot him—and joined Alistair at the peak of the ridge. “What’s up, chief?”

  “Where do we stand on the Josephine question?”

  Herb was the Wolfjaw lawyer. Alistair consulted him whenever he was faced with a thorny legal or ethical issue. The “Josephine question” was one he’d visited many times.

&
nbsp; “Same as before,” said Herb. “She hasn’t taken or passed any of our induction exams or tests. More importantly, she hasn’t taken the oath of allegiance. She’s an outsider. We don’t know where her loyalties lie. That being said, she comes to us of her own volition. We’ve never prevented her from leaving, nor encouraged her to return. We’re neither passively nor actively doing anything she might perceive as illegal, unless of course you count…”

  Alistair cut him off. He didn’t need to listen to his lawyer lecturing him on all the ways Wolfjaw contravened community standards or had straight up broken the law.

  Herb was right, though. Josephine was an outsider. She’d served a purpose, acting as she did as their grade school teacher, which was why he’d bent the rules and allowed her to return even though she’d never officially signed up and joined Wolfjaw.

  That she’d turned up so close to their base of operations with a military convoy wasn’t necessarily a mark against her. There could be any number of reasons for her to be with a contingent of the U.S. Army. She might even be a prisoner, though that didn’t seem very likely, seeing as she was on the roof of a cab. It irked him that she would arrive like this. She’d been gone from her home since the beginning of the disaster. Why was she back now? And why with these particular people? It could be a coincidence, but the optics weren’t great.

  He needed to know whether he could remove Josephine from the road below and take her to Wolfjaw with them. They were getting ready to close the gates and batten down the hatches. They were going to need a full-time teacher. This might be his last chance to convince her that she ought to join them for good. He took a deep breath and turned his attention back to Herb. “Can I remove her from the road and take her to Wolfjaw?” He paused. “Even if she’s, let’s say, a little reluctant?”

  “Josephine’s here? Now?” Herb adjusted his collar, loosening his tie a smidge. He’d been given special permission to wear a tie, even though it wasn’t part of the Wolfjaw uniform, as recognition for special services to the community. The man could have chosen any number of rewards: extra chow, no latrine duty for a month, a midnight raid. But, no. He’d requested that he be allowed to continue to wear his tie. It had no insignia or other identifying characteristic, so Alistair had allowed the oddball request. It soothed Herb, apparently, but that wasn’t why Alistair had allowed it. He’d said yes to the tie because he understood that breaking the rules was every bit as important as enforcing them when you wanted to keep your people in line. Provided he was the one doing the rule breaking, naturally.

  Alistair let Herb look through the scope for an entire minute. The man was besotted with Josephine. This, too, was useful to Alistair. If his legal counsel was going to have an obsession, let it be with an outsider. He didn’t need that legal mind turning against him or towards anyone inside Wolfjaw who might seek to oust their leader. No. Herb crushing on Josephine was fine. “Let me ask again, now that you have the lay of the land. What say you to the Josephine question?”

  “You must not coerce her. Invite, yes; bully, no. Neither should you offer her any enticement beyond that which you offer anyone else. No special treatment. We don’t want to be caught bribing her. I’ve told you this before, Alistair: I think she’s a forest ranger. I know, I know. You think she would have told us but think about it. She lives in a cabin in the forest. She comes and goes at strange times…”

  Alistair held up his hand. Herb was such a bore about Josephine. What did it matter if she worked for the Forest Service? It wasn’t like that was a real law enforcement job. Herb was paranoid. He had some theory that she was “an officer of the law” and should be treated with kid gloves. It wasn’t germane and he didn’t want to spend more time talking about it. “I hear you,” he said. “Let’s move on. What’s your position on the soldiers?”

  “Well.” Herb closed his eyes and chewed on his bottom lip. Alistair had come to understand this meant his lawyer was thinking. The man had an encyclopedic knowledge of the law, but his recall was a tad rusty.

  Time. In the end she makes all of us her unwitting and unwilling slaves.

  Herb was only in his 60s and already needed an extra few seconds to pull up what ought to have been front and center. If he’d been anyone else, Alistair would have dismissed him for incompetence or at a minimum handed out a punishment, but Herb was the only lawyer to join their number so Alistair allowed him more slack than most.

  “We have declared ourselves a nation-state…”

  “Skip it, Herb. I know all that. Get to the recommendation.”

  “The Mandela Rules remain the same. We treat our prisoners better than most prisoners in the Alt-50, but these soldiers would, or rather could, be considered prisoners of war. In which case…” Herb rattled on, giving his usual spiel about who was to be housed where, under what conditions, with what provisions for their comfort, the number of times they were to be allowed out of their cells, what they might be fed, etc., etc., etc.

  Like most Wolfjaw inhabitants, Herb made it too complicated.

  Wolfjaw wasn’t actually at war with the other 50 states, though they would claim they were if it ever went to trial. They hadn’t even seceded from the Union, much as Alistair would have liked to. There was no Alt-50, as the radicals in his ranks called the USA. There was just Wolfjaw and the rest of the world. Herb’s argument was a technical, lawyerly proposition: they were an independent nation, though unrecognized by law. As such, they had the right to defend their borders.

  Alistair needed a second layer of defense. Herb’s argument wouldn’t garner them much sympathy if they were ever arrested and charged with whatever the authorities cooked up to charge them with. The courts were corrupt. Everyone knew that. You either agreed with the powers that be or you were thrown out on your ear. For a free thinker like Alistair, the court system was a nest of vipers, a hive of hornets, a conflagration of overstuffed idiots. What he wanted was a way to legitimately claim that these people had threatened his life and invaded his home.

  “We’re at war,” said Herb. “That is the material point. When it goes to court…” Herb cited chapter and verse. He went all the way back to the Civil War, waxing lyrical about who’d said what to whom and why the phrase “one nation, indivisible” wouldn’t stand under the right kind of pressure.

  “I know. We’re a sovereign state.” Alistair cut right through Herb’s presentation. He hadn’t been listening for several minutes. He’d heard it all before. “We have the right to defend ourselves. You’ve told me the theory a million times. Answer the question I asked, not the question you think I should have asked. Soldiers or no soldiers?”

  Herb laughed. When Alistair didn’t laugh back he went back to worrying the carefully constructed double-Windsor knot that marked him out from his comrades. “They’re the same. We treat them the same. Same offer and conditions. They’re no different.”

  Alistair used his rifle as a prop and stood. “You’re sure?”

  Herb nodded. “What you need to do is…”

  “I want to make sure you’re understanding what I’m asking, Herb. Do we offer them the same deal?” What he wanted to know was whether taking United States military personnel into their camp exposed them to more or less risk than taking anyone else prisoner.

  Herb nodded. “Same deal.” He’d fallen into his usual sweaty, gulping, nervous state. The man needed to grow a set.

  “Do they need to be on our property?”

  Herb nodded, more emphatically this time.

  “You need to lead with the most important information, Herb. I’ve told you this before.”

  “Reasonable force. Imminent harm. Castle doctrine.”

  “Better.” Alistair walked down the hill towards Josephine, with Herb still chattering about who could do what to whom and why they always needed to prove that they’d been fired on first. He wasn’t wrong. But neither was he a tactician. After you were done with the “not firing first” part, you needed to woo the enemy into your palm, before invitin
g them into the fold and encouraging them to be their best selves or, should they choose a different path, crushing the life out of them.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  There was blood everywhere. A body on the ground. Her dad propped up by a tree.

  Aggie closed her mouth. It had been her making that terrible noise that echoed back at them from the trees and she hadn’t known she was doing it.

  She fell to her knees and ran her hands over her dad’s face and chest. “Are you hurt?”

  He was crying, talking, wiping his hand down his leg, picking at his shirt, looking through her, crying more, but she couldn’t get any sense out of him.

  Aggie didn’t want to look but she couldn’t help herself. She swiped her eyes down and back up again as fast as she could. It was Fran. The body on the woodland floor was Fran. Or what was left of her.

  She ran her hands over his face a second time, more slowly. With method.

  There’s something in his hair. Oh, God. Don’t think about what it is. Stay calm. Look at him. Let him see you’re here. Move your hand slowly. Pick it out. Put it to one side. There’s more. You’ve got this. It’s fine. He’s relying on you. Pick more gunk out of his hair. Don’t look at the body on the ground. Don’t think about who she was. Don’t remember all the times she made you laugh. Keep your eyes on him. She’s already dead. Is she? Yep. That’s a lot of missing skull. Good. Well, no not good. But the gloopy matter on Dad isn’t his. It’s hers. Okay. Breathe through your mouth. Don’t throw up. You have to stay calm. He needs you to stay calm. He’s in shock. Come on, Agatha, keep it together. Okay. His face is safe. There’s grey matter—not grey at all, sort of red and grey, all oily and spongy, oh, gross—on his shirt, but no cuts. Keep going. Keep picking the bits off him. Put them beside her. They’re hers.

  It was mad—thinking that Fran needed her brains back when she’d just blown them out—but that was exactly what was going through her mind.

  Here’s a piece and here’s another piece and oh, goodness that’s a bit of skull. It’s sharp. Did it cut him? No. He’s safe. Good. Okay. Now what? Keep working. Keep checking. It’s not just his face and chest that are covered in blood. It’s everywhere. On the ground, on the trees, on the leaves. Fran’s mouth is concave and her face skewed to one side. What would she do that for? Don’t think about it too much. Give Fran her brains back.