Legion of Despair: Book Three in The Borrowed World Series (5 page)

“Where?” Alice asked.

“Not on the damn porch!” Boyd said. “Down the steps. Into the yard.”

Not wanting to raise further ire, Alice felt around until she found a porch rail, then felt further until she found a rail descending. She followed it to the end of the leash, unbuttoned her pants, and peed in the grass. She felt her neck, noting that Boyd had threaded the zip tie right through a link in the chain, just as he’d said. There was nothing she could feel that would allow her to escape the leash without a knife.

She must have lingered too long because a sudden yank on the leash nearly pulled her over.

“I ain’t got all night,” he said.

When they re-entered the house, Alice’s heart filled with dread at climbing back down into the dark basement. She feared that she’d never make it out of there again.

“Do you want to talk some more, Boyd?”

He laughed. “I’m not ready to talk to you now. I will be later.”

He led her back down the steps, using the light and keeping her on a tight leash.

“Can you not tie me so tightly this time?” she asked. “Please?”

In the end, he left the leash on her neck, tying the other end to one of the support posts. He also put a fresh zip tie on her hands, but left her feet free this time.

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” he said.

“Can I have some water?” she asked. “I’m thirsty. Hungry too.”

“Maybe I’ll feed you tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe I won’t.”

Chapter 3

The Valley

Russell County, VA

In a valley alongside the Clinch Mountain range there lived a man named Buddy Baisden. Buddy had a larger ranch-style brick house that he’d built in the 1980s. The light in Buddy Baisden’s life went out two days before everyone else in Russell County lost theirs. That was the day his daughter Rachel died of an OxyContin overdose.

Buddy had already lost his wife three years earlier to some kind of female cancer that he didn’t know much about. All he knew was that it took from him the woman who made his house into a home for him and Rachel. His daughter had been a senior in high school and he began losing her the day his wife died. She spent less and less time at home, giving him vague answers about where she was and what she was doing. He gave her curfews that she ended up breaking. His punishments had a limited effect and only served to push them further apart. He gave up punishing her eventually, hoping he might preserve his relationship with the only other person in this world that he gave two damns about.

Rachel had still looked healthy, but she came home often without that glow in her eye that he lived to see. She staggered around the house and bumped into things. Several times she had lain in the bed and urinated upon herself, so high on pills that she could not even get up to use the bathroom. He had tried talking to her, which only made her mad. After those talks she would stay away from home for days to punish him, so he quit saying anything.

She’d been with her latest boyfriend for several months. He was of a cut that Buddy didn’t care for. He drove a banged up late-model Camaro in an unattractive teal color. He was forty but seemed to think he was twenty, running around with girls Rachel’s age and partying when he should have been working. Buddy wondered if he was a drug dealer, but he didn’t know enough about such things to know what the signs were.

Then one night, Rachel died outside of the Emergency Room doors at the local hospital, where she’d been dumped like garbage. She was not immediately noticed, laying there in the dark, but a nurse on a smoke break eventually found her. They tried everything they could, including administering opiate blockers, and were unable to bring her back from the dead. The police never figured out where she’d been or who she’d been with. No one was talking.

Buddy wasn’t talking. He knew who she left home with and he knew where to find him. There was some justice better administered by a father than by the court system. It was a matter of love and of honor.

Her funeral was on the very day that the lights went out. With the condition of the country and the concern about more terror attacks, no one but Buddy showed up. They buried her on a sunny day in the cemetery in town. Buddy gave her his plot, right beside his wife. He figured he’d just have to buy another for himself. He’d never counted on needing more than two.

On the way home from the funeral, Buddy stopped at the local Chevron to fill up his truck. When he pulled in, he found the pumps roped off with yellow crime scene tape. A deputy was sitting in his car, watching Buddy. A sign on the bank of pumps said: Pumps Closed.

Buddy got out of his truck and approached the deputy. “I hear the generator running,” he said. “Why ain’t they selling gas?”

“Haven’t you been watching the news?” the deputy asked, squinting up at him.

Buddy hadn’t had his television on since the police came and told him about Rachel. “No, don’t reckon I have.”

The deputy frowned at this, unable to imagine anyone who could not know what was going on in the world right now. “Terrorists are blowing shit up all over the country. They say it’s ISIS or Al Qaeda. They blew up the big refineries and it’s going to take a while to get them back online. The president has stopped all fuel sales except for police, military, and other first responders. It’s for emergencies only.”

Buddy nodded. He didn’t have the words left in him that day to argue or ask questions. He was too numb. He walked back to his truck, started it and drove off toward home.

*

Buddy’s family was not originally from Russell County, but from nearby Wise County. His father had been a coal miner for most of his life. In 1958, Buddy’s father saw his own brother crushed when a slab of un-cribbed slate dropped from the mine roof. The two men had been discussing going deer hunting the next day. As they walked in the stooped posture required by low coal toward the shuttle car that would take them out of the mine, there was a thud that shook the ground and a puff of displaced air that pushed gently against Buddy’s father’s back. He turned and found that his brother was no longer behind him. Only a hand and forearm extended from beneath the car-sized chunk of slate. He dropped and took the hand in his, but despite its warmth there was no life left in the limp flesh. Buddy’s father left the mine that day and never went underground again.

Shortly after that, Buddy’s father bought an abandoned house on an empty stretch of dirt road far from town. He spent several months gutting and remodeling the house until he had fashioned it into some semblance of what was locally known as a “beer joint.” When the interior of the building was done and all that remained was repainting the old house, a mining friend stole ten gallons of yellow safety paint from his job. Buddy’s father painted the house and all the exterior trim with that color. The paint had the added benefit of high reflectivity, a feature that enhanced the safety aspects of the product, and the result was that headlights would illuminate the building brightly when they landed on the lone structure in the remote countryside. Buddy’s father aptly named his new establishment The Yellow House.

Over the next several years, Buddy’s mother and father ran The Yellow House with modest success. They developed a reputation for good quality meals at a fair price. Cold beer could also be had at a reasonable price. While hard liquor required a license that Buddy’s father did not have, he kept such spirits under the counter and would sell them by the shot to men that he knew. For those that appreciated the novelty of untaxed clear liquor, the highest quality local moonshine was also available by the shot or by the jar.

Despite taking liberty with the letter of the law, Buddy’s father did not flaunt his under-the-counter offerings. He even developed a regular clientele of deputies and state troopers who stopped in for a free meal and a coffee mug of their preferred beverage, which was as apt to be moonshine as coffee.

The Yellow House thrived until a fall day in 1963. Buddy’s mother opened up for the lunch shift while Buddy’s father ran into town to make a bank deposit. His wife had opened the lunch shift on her own many times over the past couple of years and had never had any problems. The lunchtime opening of a drinking establishment, though, can represent Happy Hour for a man who has been working the night shift and has not yet made it home to bed.

Buddy’s mother, as she did nearly every day, served beers to such men, who would drink them with their meal and go home to sleep until their next shift. On this day, she only had a few customers and most ate their lunches and then left promptly. One man did not. He continued to drink and made comments to Buddy’s mother of an insulting and inappropriate nature. She cut him off, having served him a half-dozen beers already. This made him angry and he refused to pay, issuing vile promises to Buddy’s mother before left. These were emphasized with a firm hand encircling her wrist, a gesture that made her all too aware of the man’s strength and, at the same time, of her own vulnerability.

She had stopped her crying and shaking by the time Buddy’s father returned. She could not hide that she was upset and wilted under the pressure of her husband’s stern gaze. She told him the entire story. Buddy’s father knew the man she spoke of, and in fact had passed him walking home a few miles down the road. Buddy’s father walked out of The Yellow House and sped off, gravel spraying from beneath the tires of his black Buick Electra.

It took him no time to find the walking man, who’d turned off the main road by this time and was following a narrow dirt road along the Levisa River. Buddy’s father slid to a stop and got out of the car. The man must surely have sensed who Buddy’s father was and why he was there, but he reportedly said nothing. Buddy’s father withdrew a .25 caliber Colt automatic from his pocket. He shot the drunk man in the face until he fell and kept shooting him until the gun was empty. When he left the scene, Buddy’s father made a tight turn, backing over the body twice before his car was pointed in the right direction.

Buddy often wondered why his dad did not attempt to hide the body, but he made no such effort. The body was found and reported before the day was out. While the face of the dead man was not easily recognizable, the reek of alcohol was, and that led the police right to the door of the most likely place that the alcohol had been obtained -- The Yellow House.

When asked if he’d seen this particular man today, Buddy’s father replied that he had.

“When did you last see him?” the trooper asked.

“When I killed the son-of-a-bitch,” Buddy’s father said.

His father was sentenced to twenty years and sent to the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond. Buddy was less than a year old at the time and had vague childhood memories of visiting his father there. Buddy’s mother kept The Yellow House running in her husband’s absence, hiring various folks over the years to fill positions.

One night, shortly after Buddy’s father had been convicted and sent away, the trooper that had arrested him came into The Yellow House and sat right at the bar in front of Buddy’s mother. She held no ill-will against the man; he’d just been doing his job.

The man placed a brown paper bag onto the bar top and slid it across.

“What’s that?” Buddy’s mother asked.

The man nodded toward it. Buddy’s mother hooked a finger in the opening and tipped the bag toward her, leaning over to peer in. Inside, she saw the Colt .25 automatic.

“With the trial over with, we won’t be needing that anymore,” the trooper said in a gesture that would seem quite alien in this day and time. “But if you’re going to keep this place open,
you
might need it.”

When Buddy’s father was released after ten years for good behavior, The Yellow House was still open and waiting on him. He worked that bar until he died of a heart attack in 1977.

Buddy still had the gun his father had used to kill that man. In his family, the act had never been portrayed as murder. There were just certain actions that a person took in life that brought about a particular set of consequences. The rules of this were as set in stone as sums in arithmetic. A math problem only has one answer, as do some problems in this world. When that drunk laid his hands on Buddy’s mother, he set in place an unavoidable consequence, given the times, the region, and the man whose wife he’d touched. It was the natural world at work. There was only one answer.

The same had been done when that man drove off in his teal Camaro with Rachel and had not brought her home safely. There were unavoidable consequences. Buddy had no other course of action available to him. If the world was collapsing around him anyway, that would just make it easier for Buddy to do what he needed to do.

Chapter 4

Gary’s House

Richlands, VA

When the morning sky began to show the first signs of graying, Gary felt a little better. He’d stayed on high alert for the remainder of the night, trying to maintain a watch on his home and hoping that his sons-in-law were doing the same at their homes. He’d been stupid to not send them home with radios. He’d thought that formalizing their security measures could wait another day, and found it wasn’t the case. If he wasn’t careful, his stupidity was going to get someone killed.

His family didn’t even know about the worst part of the night yet. They were not aware of the mangled body still in his driveway. The big question that hung over Gary’s head was to understand why these people did what they did. He was sure it was a decoy maneuver of some kind and he’d fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. More stupidity on his part. Now that morning was coming and he could see without a light, he had to find out what the riders had done while he was distracted. Surely they didn’t just tie a body under his vehicle for laughs. If that was the case, they were a higher caliber of scumbag than he’d been expecting.

Armed with his AR and his pistol, Gary checked the garage first. Karen’s Jetta was parked at the side of the house and the door that led to the garage wasn’t visible from there. While he’d been occupied with that body last night, someone could have pried open the deadbolt and had access to their fuel and other emergency preparations. When he checked, he found no indication of this, though; no signs of forced entry.

He went to his outbuildings next. Although Will had said he’d emptied them of all the important supplies, the riders would most likely not have known this. They may still have thought they might find gas cans or other useable items in there. The buildings had not been tampered with. He opened each with the keys he carried in his pocket and looked around. Though things were a little disorganized where Will had hurriedly transferred the more important contents into the garage, they didn’t look like they’d been burglarized.

As he exited the last building, the sun finally broke over the hilltop. The rays of golden light hit his yard and reflected off the dew, illuminating a pair of deep tracks that led across his yard from the road. That got his attention. They were not the heavily lugged tracks of an ATV tire, nor were they narrow dirt bike tires. He followed them to where they crossed his sidewalk. The tread pattern was more visible where the vehicle had tracked mud across the concrete and he thought he recognized it.

Golf cart
.

Realizing that the directions of the tracks meant they could only lead one place, he ran furiously around the corner of the house. At the most remote side of the house, where it would have presented less of an eyesore to visitors, Gary had stored their Generac generator in a small housing specifically built for it. The housing lay upended from where it had been rolled.

The generator was gone.

Enraged, Gary kicked the empty housing several times. He finally let out a long sigh and closed his eyes. This was a blow. He knew that fuel would run out eventually but he felt like the generator had been a critical component of his emergency planning, giving them more options.

The fact that it had been stolen told him several things. It could mean that his home had been watched enough for someone to know that he had a generator and where it was stored. It could also mean that his plan to bug-in at home was fatally flawed by virtue of their location not being safe enough. For certain, it meant that he was becoming more of a victim each day, with the theft of his garden and now his generator. He didn’t like that feeling one bit.

*

Regardless of how dire the circumstances, a little daylight always made everything more manageable. Coffee would help even more. Gary went back to the kitchen to regroup, process, and plan. He started a pot of water boiling on the side burner of his gas grill. He had other means of heating the water, but the gas grill was the quickest until he got things better set up.

Like much of his gear, his various cook stoves had been stored away in the garage and his outbuildings. With Will moving things into the garage in his absence, he wasn’t even sure where to start looking for his most critical items. When he’d gone to bed last night, it had been a priority to get some of his preparations set up today and start transitioning over to using them, and now the theft of the generator left him unsure. Was it even safe to set out equipment like solar panels or would they just be stolen? It looked like security would end up being a bigger priority than sustainability.

With the coffee water heating, he took a moment to enjoy the morning view of his yard. He’d missed this sight while he’d been gone. He enjoyed it for all of about ten seconds before he caught sight of the feet sticking out from beneath his daughter’s car and realized that this had to be dealt with before everyone got up. He didn’t want his children or grandchildren to see it. He couldn’t help but want to insulate them from the ugliness of the world.

He knew the body would be heavy, literally
dead weight,
and while he would have preferred Will’s help in moving it, he didn’t want to take the time to go find him. In the meantime, he could at least hide the body somewhere and Will could help him dispose of it later. He decided that pulling the body on a sled might be easier than just dragging it. He stored his children’s old sleds under one of his outbuildings. He went to it and retrieved one of the plastic ones, hoping he could roll the body onto it and then pull it through the wet grass.

First, he cut the rope loose that held the body under the car. He’d stuck a Kershaw Cryo in his pocket that morning and he fished it out. Though he wasn’t excited about getting under the car with the body, he didn’t see any other options. In the tight quarters, the body reeked. With the corpse so closely resembling a movie zombie, Gary also had to deal with the irrational fear that the corpse would latch onto him as he worked and try to sink its teeth into him. He was relieved when he finally got the rope sliced and could put some distance between him and the body. He rolled out from beneath the car and pocketed the knife.

In short order, he dragged the body out by the ankles and rolled it onto the sled. It was nasty, disgusting work that he couldn’t imagine ever getting used to. He’d handled several dead bodies over the last couple of weeks and he hoped this wasn’t developing into a pattern. Despite the unpleasantness of it, he took a good look at the guy’s face in the light and it wasn’t familiar to him. He didn’t know the man, which made the whole process just a little easier. It spoke volumes about the state of the world that a dead guy wasn’t a big deal unless he was someone you knew.

He leaned down to pick up the rope and start pulling the sled across the yard, startled to notice Debra and Karen standing in the doorway watching him with morbid fascination. They were clearly aghast at the circumstances, seeing Gary roll a dead body onto a sled. Having been sheltered until now from the horrors that were being visited upon the rest of the world, the look on Debra’s and Karen’s faces said a lot. In seeing the casualness with which Gary dealt with this corpse, they must have begun to realize how truly awful Gary’s trip home must have been.

Gary felt that in allowing them to see this, he had somehow let them down. It disappointed him. Still, they
had
to see this kind of thing eventually. They
had
to know what was out there waiting for them. And for that matter, what was not just waiting for them, but now knocking at their door. He could not protect them if they didn’t realize how dangerous the world was.

They all just stared at each other for a moment, so many thoughts and looks racing between them.

“Do you need some help?” Debra finally asked, breaking the silence.

Gary nodded.

After they got the body behind the building and covered it with a sheet of black plastic, Gary walked around the house checking for other signs of damage that may have occurred either last night or in his absence. He was pleased that he found none. He did find one of his neighbors outside, likely doing the same thing. Gary raised a hand and waved at the man. When he waved back, Gary walked down his drive and followed the common driveway toward the man’s house. The neighbor met him along the way and they shook hands.

“I see you made it home,” the man said. He was tall and effeminate, with a dismissive tone in his soft voice that always implied a dissatisfaction with whatever was being discussed. It had irritated Gary at first until he realized that it was the man’s way and not something directed at him personally.

His name was Scott Rose and he was a self-proclaimed minister of some sort. He and Gary were polar opposites on many topics but they were in agreement where it was important. Both liked their privacy and wanted to keep their neighborhood peaceful. There were six houses total, with three belonging to Gary’s family and three belonging to Scott’s. That made it easy to make decisions affecting the neighborhood. Most of them could just be worked out between Gary and Scott. No Home Owners’ Association, no bylaws, just two guys standing in the yard over a glass of sweet tea making any decisions that had to be made.

“I did make it home,” Gary replied. “It wasn’t easy. I can’t say that I’m happy to come back home to a bunch of idiots out here riding in my yard and stealing my stuff either.”

Scott nodded. “Yeah, they hit me the night before. I didn’t catch them. Did you shoot one of them last night? I heard a shot.”

“I shot at one of them,” Gary said. “Scared him off.” Gary didn’t want to go into the whole story with Scott about the dead body and the stolen generator.

“Should have blown his nuts off,” Scott mumbled.

“Trust me, I’ve seen enough killing recently to hold me for a while,” Gary said.

Scott looked at him with a question in his eyes but it never reached his lips and Gary didn’t elaborate. Despite their years as neighbors, they weren’t close enough to talk about personal matters. Theirs was strictly a meat-and-potatoes relationship.

“I was wondering about closing the gate on our road,” Gary said. “If you got a key and I got a key that about covers everybody, doesn’t it?”

Scott nodded. “I reckon so. That may slow them down. Probably won’t stop them. You can drive around it.”

“Do you know who they are?” Gary asked. “I haven’t been able to get a look at any of them.”

Scott shook his head. “All kinds of possibilities. There’s the public housing project over the hill, then there’s also hundreds of houses up and down the main road. They could be coming from anywhere, really. There’s no shortage of Godless troublemakers.”

Gary mulled it over, staring at his house in the distance. “Things like this have a way of getting out of control,” he said. “I’ve seen it a lot recently. With no police to call, little conflicts grow into big conflicts and people get killed.”

Scott reached into the pocket of his brown polyester pants and withdrew a snub-nosed revolver. “I got no problem enforcing the law myself when I have to. Some people need killing.”

Gary stared at the gun, then raised his eyes to Scott. It was easy to talk about killing when you’d never had to do it. “You ever shot a man, Scott?”

The man met his eyes, shaking his head. “No. Never had no call to. You?”

Images of violent episodes from his journey rushed to fill Gary’s head. He saw the shocked expression of the people he’d shot on the Blue Ridge Parkway. He saw the way that life faded to death, like a flashlight losing power. He remembered the smell of the decomposing bodies they’d found on Mount Rogers, the family killed for their food and supplies. He remembered the smell of a man shot in the gut, the contents of his intestines mixing with blood and pouring from his body in a black torrent that the man’s clutching hands could not slow.

Had Gary shot men? Yes. He’d killed them and he would forever be changed by it. It was not something he cared to talk to Scott about, though. If Scott ever had to make those decisions, he could see for himself that it was not something you went around bragging about.

“I’ll shut that gate,” Gary said, turning and walking off. “You take care of yourself.”

*

By the time Gary made it back to his house, his entire clan was assembled in the kitchen and working on breakfast. They were discussing the events of night, using enough coded language that the grandchildren wouldn’t be able to tell what they were discussing. They were serving eggs, sausage, biscuits, butter, and jelly. Gary could not immediately tell what was made from fresh, canned, powdered, or freeze-dried ingredients. That was a good sign. Unfortunately, though, with the generator gone, there would be no more refrigeration. He hadn’t yet shared that tidbit with his family. It was only when a cup of coffee was placed in front of him that Gary realized he’d walked off and left the water heating on the grill burner earlier. He opened his mouth to say something about it, but his wife cut him off.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I kept an eye on it.”

He smiled. The beauty of being home and back among family was that they did things like that for you. They kept an eye out for you so that you didn’t have to be so hyper-vigilant all the time. That said, it was now time for him lay out the ideas he’d tossed around in his head this morning as he’d maintained a watch.