Mask drawn down, Freestone stroked the thick chestnut beard either side of his grinning mouth. His eyes played from Pamela back to Tom and a few gentle notes arose in his frown lines as he tried to make the connection between the two of them and gave up.
“Damn, woman, that was well played,” he said at last.
Freestone looked at Tom a moment and hummed to himself. He switched his gaze to the woman.
“What’s your name?”
“Pamela de Jong.”
“OK,” the Raider chief said and motioned to her. “You faced that well, Pam. We like you. You can go.”
The tough woman was too surprised to move.
“Go,” Freestone said. “You’ll be walking the whole way and you’re not going armed, so there’s a pretty good chance you’re not gonna make it, wherever it is you’re going. But if you do, you can tell everyone what you saw here and demonstrate a little object lesson in what you’re gonna get if you come for my people again.”
Pamela stood staring hard at him as if ashamed to leave or probably not even trusting it.
“Go,” the bearded man said again. “You’re too old for any of us to marry, and you look like you’d be tough eating anyway, you know what I mean? Like one of those old mother hens been in the yard too long and not much good even for soup. Go, now. Before I change my mind.”
The woman glanced at Tom, but couldn’t quite meet his eye. Tom didn’t know why. She’d offered her life for his. He lifted his hand as if he might say something, but she was already walking away across the field past the assembled riders with none of them making a move except to spit.
Tom lowered his hands and slowly motioned to show he wasn’t planning anything stupid.
Freestone stepped closer, no more than lunging distance apart.
“You’ve got kids?”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “Yeah, I do.”
“Good.”
He lifted one arm and clicked his fingers and the two men in his shadow moved towards Tom unlooping their saddle ropes.
***
After The Apocalypse
*
Book 3
Resurgence
by Warren Hately
Currency issue comes later: Council
by Delroy Earle
COUNCIL President Dana Lowenstein has hinted that inconsistency around the City’s rations program is a roadblock to introducing a standard currency.
Pressed on the issue by the Herald this week, Dr Lowenstein said preparing for winter and maintaining stability were the Council’s priority.
“There are too many complicating factors to consider a solution to the City’s money problem,” Dr Lowenstein said.
The Traders Alliance has pushed hard for introduction of a currency and asked the City to endorse live ammunition as a de facto payment system, backed by Armory reserves.
Alliance spokesman Samuel Hoskeens said traders needed a City-backed solution to resolve long-running problems.
“They may as well say the bullet is the new dollar if they won’t explain why they’re not doing anything,” Mr Hoskeens said.
“Trade prices keep climbing and it’s not an issue of supply and demand.
“Traders never know if the next exchange’s gonna go bad, so they’re acting with extreme caution.”
Mr Hoskeens said traders have been threatened and injured in disputes with Citizens.
The death last week of battery wholesaler Carlos Gutierrez stemmed from an argument about an unpaid account.
Gutierrez’s killer, name unknown, was later executed by troopers under the City’s standing orders.
President Lowenstein said the Council’s inaction did not mean the currency issue was unimportant.
“We recognize the traders’ concerns, we just can’t do anything about it right now,” she said.
“This might be a puzzle for a future Council to solve.”
Dr Lowenstein declined to explain her comments or offer a concrete timeline for currency reform.
The Administration referred questions about rations supplies to the President.
*
TOM WAS PRETTY sure they were fixing to hang him.
He took a couple of instinctive steps back as the two cowboys closed in, each holding a coiled rope, the dude on the left with his eyes fixed so hard on Tom’s left hand he telegraphed every move. Freestone’s voice rang out over the muttering of the fifteen other assembled Confederates, many of them still on horseback.
“Take off that tool belt you got there, Vanicek.”
Tom hadn’t even thought to fight his way free with the ax on his belt. Most of the still mounted Confederates had guns at ease or already trained on Tom. It gave their leader the confidence to stand just a short distance away with his hands on the hips of his leather pants, hitching back the stockman’s jacket to flash the Colt .45 holstered low on his thigh like a gunslinger of old.
“Don’t even think about it, buddy,” said the Confederate moving in on Tom’s right.
Tom’s hands were raised, ready to protect himself. But he stayed rooted to the spot as the two cowboys closed the final distance and pulled his arms behind his back and roped him up as fast as any wayward steer. Once they had him painfully trussed with his wrists bound, the closest one undid the buckle of the tool belt with a haste to finish the homoerotic act, Tom’s pained gasps too much distraction as the belt fell heavily to the dirt.
The man on the left tightened the rope and Tom grunted, shunted off his footing, something weird and garlicky about the two Confederates’ breath in his face as the second one then pushed him forward, hard eyed, keeping Tom off balance and prompting him into a few more staggered steps towards Freestone.
Yet another Confederate stepped between them, and the blood-tipped arrow in his hand didn’t bode well. Freestone accepted the evidence and the messenger drew back with the others and someone kicked Tom’s legs out from under him and he fell onto his ass with another grunt, the dude on his right putting a boot against Tom’s chest to cut short any idea he might have about getting up again.
The sun was in his eyes. Tom squinted, not able to do much about his ragged breathing, nor to stem the bleed of fast-flowing thoughts that he was getting prepped for execution. Freestone’s gravid, bearded face swimming in and out of focus with the sunlight behind him a flattering camera effect wasn’t helping. Tom felt his stomach lurch and he crawled enough aside to safely puke his guts up in the dust, surrounded by the pitiless laughter of Freestone’s men watching.
“This your arrow?”
Again, someone shook Tom alert and forced him back to look at their leader as Freestone took a step forward and his shadow fell across him like it was some kind of mercy.
“Vanicek,” the older man said again. “This your arrow?”
Tom looked up just in time not to see the left hook coming. Freestone’s fist crashed into the rise of his cheekbone and drove him literally into the ground, dirt caking the other side of Tom’s face and filling his mouth, lips parted by the force of impact. All he could do was lay there a few seconds and will his consciousness back into action, the pain so sharp it almost ceased to exist amid the disorientation.
Then he used his elbow to right himself, sitting up almost cross-legged with Freestone glowering over him, good to go again.
“Yes,” Tom answered.
He tasted blood inside his mouth and wondered how that was possible, forcing himself to stay alert and do his best to look up and meet the leader’s eyes, envious of the utter lack of care in Freestone’s expression as the slightly older man crouched, watching him, giving nothing away at what fate the admission sealed.
“That’s my arrow,” Tom said as if it needed extra verification. “I’m sorry.”
“He’s sorry!” someone jeered off to the side.
“I bet you’re fuckin’ sorry now, you piece of shit,” Freestone said.
The leader straightened, at once waving off one of Tom’s two captors volunteering to kick the
shit out of their captive. Freestone looked around instead and sucked in air through his teeth, scratching a little and then casting his eyes back at Tom.
“You got cigarettes?”
“No.”
Freestone glanced to one of those nearby associates, the men standing and the men on their horses all upholstered with looks ranging from mildly amused to wishing painful murder on the man practically hogtied before them.
“Who’d he kill?” their leader asked.
“Cohen.”
Freestone didn’t say anything to that. He gave Tom a long, speculative look, then motioned with his off hand and turned back to the horses.
“Bring him along.”
The other men broke into activity, most mounting horses, several more cantering across to where two more men had lain the bodies of their dead comrades over their widowed horses. As Tom watched, the burnt corpses of three of his own patrol members were cut from the steed on which they’d been bound, dropping to the parched soil like just more dead weight.
The tension tightened on the two ropes binding Tom from behind, then tightened further, Tom’s eyes flailing around in growing alarm as he felt himself propelled forward, nearly losing his balance in a crack in the ground before tracing the ropes to their sources as the two men guarding him mounted up as well, lashing the ropes to their saddlehorns as Freestone mounted up and snapped his reins and cast one final look around. The look settled on Tom’s panicked face and the Confederates leader tilted his head slightly and cracked a bemused grin without any real sentiment in it.
“Aw shucks, Teller, you can’t drag him like that,” he said. “His hands are all wrong.”
The closest of the two men had a natural ruddy stripe at the lip of his beard. Teller shot Tom a glance showing he’d just as soon put a bullet in him and save everyone else the hassle.
“Let’s get those arms out in front so he doesn’t hold us up heading back to camp,” Freestone said.
“Untyin’ him, boss?” Teller asked.
Freestone only laughed.
“He killed Cohen,” Freestone said. “What do you think?”
“I only killed one of your men,” Tom said before he’d thought much through. “Please, I’m sorry. I really am. Not saying I didn’t do it. He was about to shoot my friend.”
“Your fuckin’ people opened fire first,” Freestone snapped. “I don’t give a shit what you’ve got to say. Teller, Wolski, get it done.”
Their leader wheeled his horse away, Freestone’s two lieutenants grinning back at Tom with anticipation.
*
FROM THE VANTAGE of their horses, Teller and Wolski worked the tight ropes taut, expertly directing their steeds in a dainty backwards retreat. The angle of the ropes jarred Tom’s wrists and elbows even higher, doubling him over, and the pain was too stark even to elicit a shocked gasp as he bent further forward, desperate to relieve the pressure while feeling the fast rush of panic worsen as he realized there was no escape. The backtracking horses gathered pace now, and Tom fell into a staggering run he knew he couldn’t maintain.
And then it happened all at once.
His right shoulder gave a sickening crack as the ropes drew his bound wrists up and over his mid-back – the same moment Tom’s feet gave out and Teller or Wolski giddyupped the horses and Tom did the only thing he could, trying awkwardly, desperately, to twist to one side to protect himself as his arms went up and over his head from behind and his face and chest ploughed into the dirt as the riders dragged him across the ground with his shoulders screaming in agony fierce enough to knock him out.
The reprieve was only a few seconds long. Tom gasped awake as his face collided with the roots of a weedy outgrowth in the abandoned grassy plain and then the freight train roar of his injured shoulders shook him back into consciousness.
The tension with his wrists ahead of him put unbearable strain on Tom’s damaged or maybe shattered shoulder joints. In desperation, he stuck one knee into the ground and tried to get to his feet again, even as he was dragged along at a cantering pace, and for a few seconds there, all he could do was fall and flail and scream in pain, pissing himself, before he finally got a lucky heel into the ground and lumbered into a run like the imitation of some immense beast too dumb to know when it had a fatal wound and just give in and die already. He made ten yards before falling one more time, dragged by his bleeding wrists ahead of him, though the horses then slowed a little from their initial momentum and he got to his feet again before the soul-shredding pain of captivity could overwhelm him fully.
The cowboys emitted a few clichéd jeers and yells as they gathered their disparate bands together into the one, twenty-strong group, about eight corpses in total on their remaining steeds. Tom stumbled along behind them like an over-aged frat boy caught in the most harrowing of initiation pranks gone wrong, and an image flashed inopportunely through Tom’s mind of an old Youtube video he’d watched once on a coffee break showing a water skier trying to keep up the pace when a bad angle hurtled him along and through a river bank filled with picnicking families – though the unreliable grainy images in Tom’s memory only seemed to underscore the barbarity of his rough treatment now, a world away from rainy days spent staring out the windows of his high rise with a coffee in hand and the phone ringing unanswered.
The posse headed back in the direction from which Freestone’s band had come, away behind the neighboring farmhouse now obviously revealed as a ruse to lull Tom and his dead friend Dan MacLaren into a false sense of comfort during the ill-conceived mission that was their undoing. There wasn’t any way Tom could keep up, though the pain, especially in his right shoulder, burnt bright enough that he could register and even start trying to think through what the hell’d happened to him, focusing in belabored breaths as he stumbled, jogging, trying to keep up as he felt the twisting, grinding movement of his right shoulder in sharp focus, somehow probably not broken, but wrenched beyond belief bad enough to become a lifelong disfigurement if things continued as they seemed determined, Tom tripping twice and not managing to dodge as Teller spat at him. Then finally one of the horses gave the slightest skip and Tom was hauled off his feet and came down hard, right on his bread basket, as they might say, and the wind exploded from him a second before he headbutted the ground and everything went completely black.
It stayed that way for so long that when he awoke, it was only cause for yet more regret.
*
THE COWBOYS HAD tiny legs and feet clad in boots that made little sense until Tom blinked the dirt and dried blood from his eyes and realized it was children, not adult men, standing in a ring around him watching as Teller and Wolski dumped him from the back of one of the horses and unwound the ropes from his torn and useless arms.
He was in agony. Every part of him screamed in pain, and the fact his shoulders were the least of it was the most worrying of all. His arms were deathly numb – though he could say that of his head too. He thought about pins and needles, wondering if a head could go to sleep as well, and his thoughts started to slide away at that point until a boot nudged him back into consciousness.
There were about a dozen children, some little more than toddlers, hair bleached by the sun, and ruddy faces clean despite their open surrounds. They wore functional clothes in good repair, and boots or runners, though the toddlers were mostly barefoot. Many wore overalls. One of the older boys grinned as he watched Tom’s obvious despair, curled unmoving on the ground, and the kid unbuttoned his corduroys and started forward as if to piss on him.
“Lordy, put your pecker away,” a gruff voice said off in the theater to Tom’s right.
With difficulty, Tom rolled onto his side, scrunching up as a way to turn around just enough to see a few of the Confederate men standing over him, shadows lengthened by the late of the day.
Tom started to black out again as the white-haired boy retreated and shot him a dour look. A few of the little girls giggled. A woman’s voice called most of them away. Horses whinnied
in the distance and Tom had no more than the vaguest impression of a camp of pitched tents, a few covered wagons, a stack of poultry cages one atop another, two women at a barrel washing metal plates, horses tethered behind them, a teenage boy and girl checking a hoof, the girl scrubbing with a brush.
He fought the darkness and lurched onto hands and knees, spluttering aloud, looking up, trying to make his eyes focus. The longer he kept them open, the more life – and excruciating pain – crept into his right shoulder. His other shoulder somehow moved more easily, saved the worst of it, he figured, during the torture of the ropes hoisting his arms over his head from behind. But he needed his right arm for the bowstring, and the constant, stomach-churning slow-burn pain seeping through him and up into Tom’s skull made him deeply aware he was deeply vulnerable, disarmed almost literally, a study of armed men around him. And beneath it all, the subtle awareness of his own mortality ran like a black, subterranean watercourse. He breathed deeply, forcing himself to relax for just a moment, before the next chance he’d need to seize to clamber his way out of what again felt like a certain doom.
Tom focused his gaze on a sliver of the surrounding tableau. A woman with her hair covered by a kerchief stood in the distance showing a tamed goshawk to a small group of boys and girls. And as Tom watched, he saw this was no petting zoo. Behind the woman stood a teenage boy and girl with hooded hunting birds perched on their leather gloves. A younger girl with a shrewd face held a mouse in two hands as she and the others took in the lesson.
Tom wanted to see what they’d do with the mouse, but the darkness kept sinking into his view and he felt the searing burn of where they’d dragged him across the Ohio hinterland, his chest and arms and thighs aching and riddled with cuts, taking in God knew what sort of wounds beneath the grime and muck coating him.
Slowly, he grunted and sat up without using his bound hands, drawing a few chuckles of surprise and maybe even appreciation from the nearby Confederates. There were only six of them around Freestone. Teller and Wolski stood there too. Tom only had enough willpower to keep from dry retching. He closed his eyes, damning himself if they wanted to kill him right then and there.
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set Page 41
