Fail State, page 22
part #2 of End of Days Series
26
All the truth you need
Rick had killed three men in the night. A fourth lay wounded in a dry gully that looked to James as though it might be a natural water course in the wet season. The deadfall littering the tiny ravine was tinder dry, but a couple of inches beneath the surface the loamy soil was damp and soft. The injured man was also kind of damp and soft. He was shirtless. Lathered in rank, stale sweat, he had also wet his pants. Rick had cut away the camo-patterned material where a bad leg fracture had torn through the skin, exposing an obscenely white bone shard to the air. The limb was bent at a terrible angle, where legs should not bend at all. The man moaned and shuddered, partly from shock, mostly in pain.
James had trouble looking at him. Every time a tremor ran through his body the whole vast and naked bulk of it shuddered like meat jelly.
"I say we just leave the sumbitch here," the woman said.
"We can't do that, Tammy," Mel said, but without conviction.
She was standing closest to the man, but not so close that he could lay hands on her if he tried to. She wore an anxious, deeply disturbed expression. Rick Boreham sat nearby on a fallen log cradling his assault rifle, drinking coffee from a thermos they had brought back from the campsite. He seemed unaffected. The sun was up now and the nighttime chill was gone. Going to be another scorcher, James thought. The wounded man would not last the day.
The three bodies lay where they had fallen nearby—or where Rick had dropped them, to be perfectly honest—all painted in blood from gunshot wounds. Flies swarmed in black, humming clouds around the corpses. James wondered how long it would be before they started to smell. It was going to be a hell of a job burying them, if that’s what they ended up doing. One of the dead guys was enormously fat. Easily as big as the wounded man. Maybe even more so. They were obviously related. Possibly even twins.
It almost seemed a waste of time and energy to bury them. There must be millions of bodies lying around the country by now, he thought. Jesus, what would it be like in places like New York?
Hell of a thing, though, just leaving people out to rot.
Off in the distance he could hear the faint but happy cries of children and the barking of a dog . Tammy Kolchar’s friend was back at the main campsite with Michelle and four kids. James was pretty sure Tammy was mom to the older pair. She wasn’t attending to her children at that moment, though. She was zoned in on the fallen man with furious intensity. Her rage was all the more impressive for being so tightly reined in.
McGuigan was the name on the man’s driver’s license. Francis McGuigan. Mel had retrieved his wallet when Rick cut away the leg of his pants.
He was, according to Tammy Kolchar, a pedophile. They all were. Or some of them were. Ms Kolchar hadn’t been entirely lucid on the topic when Rick brought her into camp with the kids and her friend Roxarne, and she hadn’t really got her shit together in the time since. Fair enough, he conceded, if her story was true.
Mel was trying to sort it out, but Tammy seemed less interested in helping with any investigation than she did in straight up executing its subject.
“They was gonna kill us and mess with our kids. We heard them taking about it,” she hissed. “I was listening to them in their camper. They was almost squealing like pigs they was laughing so much at it.”
“But not all of them?” Mel said.
Tammy rolled her eyes at the stupidity of the question.
“I already told you that! Cracker Barrel Darryl weren’t no child molestor. He’s just a rapist. He was gonna take Roxy.”
The dying man’s protest grew louder. He moaned, “No, no,” but James couldn’t tell whether he was denying the allegation or simply giving voice to the agony of his shattered limb. Mel gave up on her witness, turning instead on Rick. Her tone was mild, but she still sounded like the cop she had once been.
"Why did you think it was necessary to open fire on them?"
Rick shrugged. Pushed back.
"Why do you think it’s necessary to ask?"
Mel opened her mouth. Closed it. And opened it again.
"Rick, we can't just go around shooting people. Not without cause."
“Oh he had plenty of fuckin’ cause,” Tammy butted in. “Don't y’all worry about that.”
Mel held up one hand to forestall further interruptions. She said nothing more to Rick, but it was obvious from her expression that she expected some sort of explanation from him. He sipped his coffee, screwed the lid back on, and stretched as though waking from a long slumber. He resettled the assault rifle in his lap.
"I heard the shots, as you did back at the camp. I heard the women and the children screaming. I saw four armed men in pursuit of Tammy and her friend. And the children," he added. "Maybe two weeks ago I would’ve looked for a cop. But that time has passed, Mel. And we need to figure out what to do with this gentleman now."
Rick nodded at the wounded… what? Prisoner? Were they into that line of business now? James tried not to look at the grotesque wound to the man’s lower leg. No bullet had done that. He'd seen similar fractures on horses which had lost their footing at speed. This guy had fallen over, probably when Rick put his friends under fire. It spared him a bullet, but he was going to die of it anyway. His whole considerable weight had come down on his shin bone at a bad angle. It was very hard to look at. Neither Mel nor Rick, who had probably seen more than their fair share of such things, seemed bothered by it. And Tammy Kolchar looked as if she wanted to go stamp on the broken bone a couple of times before shooting McGuigan in the face. It spoke to the genuine loathing she held for him, and with it the veracity of her story. But neither of the other two were of a mind to allow her to do that; at least not yet.
James carried his Ruger on a shoulder strap and he found his free hand straying to the weapon as if for reassurance. He made a conscious effort to stop caressing the rifle. It was of no use now. His stomach growled. He’d made breakfast for the kids and coffee for the two women, but it was more than fifteen hours since he’d last eaten. The screech of cicadas was almost loud enough to drown out the buzzing of the flies feasting on the dead. James felt dizzy with the heat of the morning, his empty stomach, and the sticky horror of the scene.
"Tammy," Rick said, surprising James, and Mel too, to judge from her expression. "Do you know how long you've been on the road? How many days and nights?”
The question seemed to draw the young woman out of her angry fugue state.
For the first time since they had returned to the killing scene, she turned away from the wounded man. Rick sketched a smile for her, his expression kindly. It seemed to short-circuit the intense fury she had focused on McGuigan.
"I don't know," she said. “Sorry. We sorta lost track."
"When did you leave your home town?" Mel asked, picking up the line of questioning.
"That was late on the day of the big computer attack," Tammy said with greater certainty. "I remember that because all our point-of-sale shit went down. And it was just after the distributors called to say they had warehouse trouble and we had nothin’ coming’ for the weekly restock anyhow. So I guess we been on the move since then."
Rick nodded.
“Twelve days," he said. "You've done very well. You kept your kids safe. You should be proud of that.”
Tammy Kolchar stared at Rick as though he had grown a second head. Her expression was completely blank for at least a second. The morning light, dancing through the forest leaves, played across her face. She had big racoon eyes from lack of sleep, but she finally nodded as though affirming what he had said. Yes, she was proud of that.
"It weren't easy," she said. "I thought we could hang out at my brother’s place. He has a farm. Or he worked on one anyway. But he wasn’t there. Nobody was. And turned out it wasn’t a real farm anyhow. There was no food a kid could eat, so we kept going."
"Do you remember the names of any of the places you drove through?" Mel asked. Her voice had softened noticeably.
James wasn't sure what they were doing, but he was sure that they were working together. Rick passed the thermos to Tammy and in one of his pockets he found a protein bar, which he also gave to her.
“Doesn’t taste the best,” he said. “But it’ll help if you got the head spins.”
"Thanks," she said in a small voice. "We ate a lot last night, but I vomited everything up when we ran. When I knew what was happening. I’m hungry."
Rick nodded.
Tammy tore the wrapper from the protein bar and stuffed half the length into her mouth.
"And you ended up at the roadside stop because you couldn't get into Dryfork, is that right?"
Tammy stopped chewing to answer him around the mouthful of food.
"Yeah. There was like a police barricade, but no police.” She held up one finger. Finished chewing her mouthful, swallowed, and went on. “There was just heaps of people with guns and stuff. They told us we weren’t local and we had to keep driving through. We couldn't stay there. There wasn't enough food for outsiders they said. That's how we ended up at the rest stop. It wasn't even really a campsite. More like one of those places to pull off the road and break the trip, you know?"
"I do," Rick said. "And that fella there and the ones he was with, they pulled in after you, right?"
Tammy answered after biting off a piece of the protein bar and washing it down with a swig of coffee.
"Yeah, they had food. Lots of it. And it was fresh too, but I don't know where they got it. No way anybody in that town sold it to them."
"No," Mel Baker agreed, her voice thoughtful.
The wounded man groaned, louder than before.
"Water, please, I'm thirsty," he said in a feeble rasp. James was about to step over to him with a canteen, but Rick raised a hand and shook his head.
"Don't waste that," he said.
"Rick, the man needs water," Mel said.
But Rick just shook his head slowly, almost regretfully.
"No," Rick said. “I’ll wager the man needs putting down."
"Please," the man croaked. His body spasmed, sending blubber waves rolling through the mounds of fish-white belly.
"You shut the hell up," Tammy spat at him. She picked up a rock and threw it at him. It missed a wide margin and went on to disturb the thick cloud of flies around his dead companions. The dense black swarm broke up for a second, but quickly descended on the bodies again. James half motioned for her to stop, but she had already backed off, her arms folded tightly across her chest.
Mel took a few steps toward Rick, lowering her voice.
"Rick, no," she said.
“I’m sorry, babe, but it’s the best thing for it," Rick said. “I don’t like it at all, but even if we could look after him, and we can't, what are we gonna do? Bandage him up, give him our antibiotics, and tell the cops? You think anybody’s coming up from Dryfork for this guy? That sheriff back in Aurora, you think he’ll hike up here? Despatch an air ambulance?”
James couldn’t let the man, whatever his sins, go without a sip of water.
“It’s not decent,” he said quietly. Mostly to himself. He took the canteen over to McGuigan, knelt down, unscrewed the cap, and lifted the bottle to his lips. The man drank greedily, spilling water down the thick folds of pink flab around his neck. James kept the water up to him and nobody made a move to intervene. He tried to ignore the foul stink coming off McGuigan, but his throat closed up against it. He gagged.
"I know what I saw, Mel," Rick said. "Four men chasing these women and their children intent on murder. That's all the truth I need to know."
"So?" Mel said. "What are you going to do? Shoot him?"
"No," Rick said, keeping it low and slow. “It would be a mercy, but it’d also be a waste of a bullet we might need later."
“James is right,” Mel said. “This is not decent. It’s not us, Rick.”
Her frustration was plain on her face. She stepped up to Rick and placed a hand on his arm.
“You were a soldier. I understand what that means. My brother was too. But I was a copper. People think they’re almost the same thing, but they’re not, Rick. You understand that. Soldiers break things down. They fuck shit up. Because sometimes you have to. But all my life, Rick, I been about helping people hold things together. I’ve always tried to stop the world from coming apart, and that’s what’s happening, not just here. Everywhere. We still got choices Rick. We’re not animals. We can fuck shit up or we can hold it together. It’s up to us.”
“Not it’s not just about us,” Rick said quietly. “It’s how things are now, Mel. I don’t want this. I don’t want any of it, but there is worse than this. I’ve seen it, Mel, when things fall part. You’re right that we still have choices, but they’re all hard. And if we don’t make those choices, good and decent people are gonna get hurt.”
“Well he ain’t decent,” Tammy said, pointing at McGuigan. “That’s for damn sure.”
“I can make it quick,” Rick said. “Painless,” he added. “Without wasting ammunition.”
“No,” Mel said, shaking her head. “You do that, Rick and there’s no coming back from it. Not for you. Not for us. This isn’t a war. And you are not a soldier any more. And even if you were, you wouldn’t just slot this bloke.”
“No,” Tammy agreed, but with a very different tone. “He don’t deserve that. He should fuckin’ suffer.”
James stood up.
“Enough,” he said firmly; so loud he surprised even himself. “Lets at least check out this whole story. If these characters have been up to no good, it’ll show. There’ll be evidence. Probably in the camper van.”
He looked to Mel for support.
She didn’t seem convinced, but she agreed in the end.
“Sure, okay. If it means we don’t just murder this git. I’ll check it out. See what sort of shit he and his mates were into.”
She turned on Tammy.
“But even if it turns out he’s a complete villain, it don’t mean you get to just kill him.”
Rick nodded.
“Sounds like a plan. I can stay and keep an eye on him. I promise not to put his lights out. But I’m not of a mind to waste our supplies on him either. I believe Miss Tammy here, her little ones, and their companions were in mortal danger from this man and his comrades.”
“Fine,” Mel sighed. “I’ll go with James. I will check out the van and Tammy’s… allegations.”
“Weren’t no allegations,” Tammy said. “They was gonna kill me and Roxy and have their way with our children. You’ll see if you really was a cop. You’ll see.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Finally, Mel spoke up.
“Yes,” she said. “I will.”
27
(Interlude)
Wilson, Kansas wasn’t terribly close to any major cities. With a population that hovered a little south of eight hundred souls, times were usually pretty quiet. The years and the seasons would come and go, and very little changed. Most around these parts preferred it that way.
It had been a rude shock then, when Route 70, the major highway that passed to the north of town by about a mile, started vomiting cars filled with distraught, desperate people into the main street of Wilson. The out-of-towners came looking for something anything they might eat or drink or simply stack into the back of their expensive SUVs and sedans. At first the merchants of Wilson had been more than willing to help out and of course to profit. Nothing wrong with making good by doing good. But the last ten days had made a difference. No trucks had arrived to restock the shelves at the Stop 2 Shop or the Krogers. Gasoline tankers did not top up the pumps at Ray Camden’s Texaco, out by the off ramp.
The TV news had gone bad. And then had just gone altogether.
Train tracks pierced downtown Wilson like an arrow, but the trains themselves? Stopped days ago. Maybe for good.
For a short while there was the radio.
But now that had mostly gone silent, too, save for a couple of single-handed operators, clearly religious nut jobs, who appeared to have gone mad beneath the unforgiving sun.
That same sun beat down on John Mathers as he walked along Old Route 40 in a pair of faded Army pants. He had a lever-action Marlin in his hands; it wouldn’t do to sling it. His eyes cast nervously from side to side. He was headed for the Stop 2 Shop, his wife having sent him to see if he could find some beans, or better yet a bag of rice. Mathers shook his head as he walked past the World’s Largest Czech Egg; he did not spare the famous local curiosity a glance.
The streets of his hometown had been transformed—in nothing flat it seemed to him—into a landscape of threats and strangers that would make a Dali, or maybe that Munch fellow, proud. As he scanned around for threats and problems, he marvelled at the way he recalled the names of those painters from an art class in High School so long ago. Then he marvelled at his own foolishness in letting his thoughts wander .
His sleepy hometown had turned kind of nightmarish in a little over a week. Not quite a war zone, as he knew only too well, but not a nice or healthy place, either. Not the quiet, pleasant town he’d come home to after his war. It had quickly become a thing that happened in Wilson that anything not guarded or chained down would walk off or get plucked clean. His neighbour Rich Atterbury’s prize pear tree got itself fully stripped on the evening of the third day and the pear thieves hadn’t even woken Rich’s dog, Sophie. Imagine that. She was a notorious barker.
It was every man for himself, John thought, as the convenience store came into sight. When he saw the store though, he simply shook his head and cursed. As he had feared, the trip had been a dangerous damn waste of time. There was a crowd of listless refugees hunkered down there, one person lay on the ground. Maybe sleeping, John thought, but he didn’t look any closer to find out. He glanced over at Wilson Wine and Spirits, the store’s shattered glass windows glittered like fangs in the white hot sun. It had been robbed the second day. Out-of-towners for sure. Nobody local would have done that.
