voltage current of his adrenaline.
Woodbury keeps its food rations in a brick warehouse across from the old courthouse. Brian pauses in front of the warehouse when he sees the old derelict juicers loitering across the street in front of the flagstone government building with its chipped Romanesque columns. Other folks stand on the stone steps, nervously smoking cigarettes, while others crowd the entranceway. Brian crosses the intersection and approaches the gathering.
“What’s going on?” he asks the fat old man in the Salvation Army coat.
“Trouble in River City, son,” the old codger says, jerking a greasy thumb at the courthouse. “Half the town’s in there havin’ a powwow.”
“What happened?”
“Found three more residents out in the woods yesterday, picked clean as chicken bones … place is crawlin’ with roamers now, drawn by the racetrack most likely. Damn fools makin’ all that noise.”
For a moment, Brian considers his options. He could very easily avoid this mess, pack up, and move on. He could boost one of the four-wheelers and take Penny in the back and be gone in a flash.
He doesn’t owe these people anything. The safest bet is to not get involved, just get the fuck out of Dodge. That’s the smartest way to play it. But something deep inside Brian makes him reconsider. What would Philip do?
Brian stares at the crowd of townspeople milling about the entrance to the courthouse.
TWENTY-THREE
“Does anybody even know what their names were?” A woman in her late sixties with a halo of fright-wig gray hair stands up in the back of the community room on the first floor of the courthouse building, the veins in her neck wattle pulsing with tension.
The thirty or so beleaguered residents of Woodbury gathered around her—town elders, heads of small families, former merchants, and passers-through who landed here almost by mistake—fidget on folding chairs in tattered coats and muddy boots, facing the front of the narrow conference room. The space has an end-of-world feel to it, with crumbling plaster, overturned coffee urns, exposed wiring, and litter strewn across the parquet floor.
“What the fuck difference does it make?” barks Major Gene Gavin from the front of the room, his minions behind him with their M4 assault rifles on their hips like faux gangbangers. It feels right and proper to the Major to be standing at the head of this little town hall meeting right now, near the flagpoles displaying the American and Georgia State flags. Like MacArthur taking over Japan, or Stonewall Jackson at Bull Run, the Major relishes the opportunity to finally make his stand as the leader pro tem of this miserable town full of chickenshits and rejects. Ramrod tough in his green fatigues and jarhead brush cut, the Major has been waiting for this moment, biding his time for weeks.
No stranger to whipping pussies into shape, Gavin knows he needs respect in order to lead, and in order to be respected, he needs to be feared. Which is exactly how he used to deal with the weekend warriors under his command at Camp Ellenwood. Gavin was a survival instructor with the 221st Military Intelligence Battalion, and he used to torment those lily-livered weaklings on overnight bivouacs up to Scull Shoals by shitting in their duffels and giving them the rubber hose treatment for the smallest infractions. But that might as well have been a million years ago.
“It was just a couple of them new guys,” Gavin adds as an afterthought. “And some slut from Atlanta.”
An elderly gentlemen in the front stands up, his bony knees trembling: “All due respect … that was Jim Bridges’s daughter, and she weren’t no slut. Now, I think I speak for everybody when I say we need protection, maybe a curfew … keep people in after dark. Maybe we could take a vote.”
“Sit down, old man … before you hurt yourself.” Gavin gives the old geezer his best menacing look. “We got bigger problems to deal with now—there’s a goddamn convention of them Biters closing in on us.”
The old man takes his seat, grumbling to himself. “All that noise from the damn dirt races … that’s the reason them Biters is surroundin’ us.”
Gavin unsnaps the holster on his hip, exposing the grip of his .45, and takes a threatening step toward the old man. “I’m sorry, I don’t recall opening the floor to comments from the nursing home.” Gavin jabs a finger at the old man. “My advice is for you to shut the fuck up before you get yourself in trouble.”
A younger man springs to his feet two chairs away from the old man. “Take it easy, Gavin,” the younger man says. Tall, olive-skinned, his hair tucked under a bandana, he wears a sleeveless shirt that reveals heavily muscled arms. His dark eyes gleam with street-level smarts. “This ain’t some John Wayne movie, take it down a notch.”
Gavin turns to the man in the bandana, brandishing the .45 with menace. “Shut your mouth, Martinez, and put your spic ass back in your chair.”
Behind Gavin, the two Guardsmen tense up, swinging the muzzles of their M4s up and into ready positions, their eyes scanning the room.
The man named Martinez just shakes his head, and sits back down.
Gavin lets out a frustrated sigh.
“You people don’t seem to grasp the seriousness of this situation,” he says, holstering the .45 as he moves back to the front of the room, speaking with the cadence of a drill instructor. “We’re sittin’ ducks here, we don’t do somethin’ about them barricades. Got a bunch of freeloaders takin’ up space. Expecting everybody else to carry the weight. No discipline! I got news for ya, your little vacation is over. Gonna be some new rules, and you’re all gonna pitch in, and you’re gonna do what you’re told, and you’re gonna keep your fucking mouths shut! Am I making myself clear?”
Gavin pauses, daring somebody to object.
The townspeople sit in silence, looking like children who’ve been sent to the principal’s office. In one corner, Stevens, the physician, sits next to a young woman in her twenties. Dressed in a stained smock, the girl has a stethoscope draped around her neck. Stevens looks like a man smelling something that’s been rotting for a long time. He raises his hand.
The Major rolls his eyes and lets out an exasperated sigh. “What is it now, Stevens?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” the doctor says, “but we’re stretched thin already. We’re doing our best.”
“What’s your point?”
The doctor gives him a shrug. “What is it you want from us?”
“I WANT YOUR GODDAMN OBEDIENCE!”
The booming response barely registers on Stevens’s thin, cunning features. Gavin takes long, even breaths, getting himself back under control. Stevens pushes his eyeglasses up the bridge of his nose and looks away, shaking his head. Gavin gives his men a look.
The Guardsmen nod in unison at the Major, trigger fingers on trigger pads.
This isn’t going to be as easy as Gavin thought.
Brian Blake stands in the back of the room, in the shadow of a dusty, bankrupt vending machine, his hands in his pockets, listening, taking it all in. His heart thumps. And he hates himself for it. He feels like a laboratory rat in a maze. The crippling fear—an old nemesis—is back with a vengeance. He can feel the speed-loader like a tumor in his pocket, the bulge cold against his thigh. His throat is tight and dry, his tongue two sizes too big for his mouth. What the fuck is wrong with him?
At the front of the room, Gavin keeps pacing in front of the gallery of town founders displayed in shopworn frames across the room’s front wall. “Now, I don’t care what you call this cluster fuck we find ourselves in, I call it war … and right now, this little shit-heel town is officially under marshal-fucking-law.”
Tense murmurings spread through the group. The old man is the only one brazen enough to speak up. “What does that mean, exactly?”
Gavin walks over to the old man. “That means y’all are going to follow orders, be good little boys and girls.” He pats the top of the codger’s bald pate like he’s petting a rabbit. “Y’all behave yourselves, do what you’re told, and we just might survive this shit storm.”
