Dark Advent (32 page)

3

For those in Brannigan’s, spring passed uneventfully. Fresh air and sunshine and the chance to stay clean again and, above all, peace had given their morale a giddy resurrection.
Peace
…had the horde in Union Station forgotten about them? They dared to hope so, even if that meant Jason had gone out for nothing.

Although they didn’t know it, Travis and his cohort had their hands full with a small but determined rebellion in West County. Armed with pistols and rifles and firebombs, they used the hit-and-hide tactics of guerillas. Overseers were shot at. Trucks were burned and supplies destroyed. Travis focused everyone he had on rooting them out, playing a cat-and-mouse game that lasted three months. Peter Solomon had thrown an extra kink in for good measure. He wanted them, whenever possible, taken alive.

The last one was captured in mid-June. A lone rogue who kept the faith even when he was the last free and living rebel, he ventured out one day to lob a Molotov into a truck loaded with medical supplies looted from a hospital. As he was speeding away, Hagar shotgunned two tires. The rebel was taken to Union Station, joining the others of his cause in the walk-in freezer of a second-floor seafood restaurant. Without power, and with the door handles removed on the inside, the walk-ins made ideal jail cells.

A couple days later, the five who’d been captured alive were marched into the center concourse of Union Station. They squinted against the bright sunshine coming through the Plexiglas of the roof. When they realized they’d been positioned before one of the fountains, they grew jittery, for more than one of them had been there to witness those initial executions last fall.

But, for this group, Peter Solomon had other plans.

“What are the charges?” he called out while pacing before them as if he were a general inspecting his troops.

“Treason. Murder. Acts of insurrection.” Travis was seated on one of the benches several yards away. Dozens of others watched from the concourse or from the second-level railings. “Being a big pain in the ass.”

“How do you plead?” Solomon asked the group.

They said nothing, hidden behind stubble and sullen eyes.

Solomon shrugged. “I’ll take that as the Fifth Amendment.” He reached into a breast pocket of his shirt, more jungle wear from the Banana Republic. He pulled out a half-dollar and held it up, took a step toward the captive on the right end.

“Call it,” he said.

The man frowned in confusion.

“We haven’t got all day,” Solomon said. “Heads or tails? Call it.”

“Tails…?” the man said quietly, still not understanding.

Solomon flipped the coin into the air, a spinning blur, and when it fell to his palm he slapped it onto the back of his other hand. Uncovered it and showed it. “Heads!” he cried. “Guilty!”

He stepped to the next one, a woman, and repeated the routine. She picked heads, it came up tails. Guilty.

On down the line: Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

With a satisfied grin, Solomon sent the coin plunking into the fountain behind them. “Five up, five down,” he said. “The Attorney General couldn’t have done any better.”

“Then I guess that means we should get ready for your fucking arena,” spat the last holdout to be captured.

“
You’re thinking too small
,”
Solomon said. “The entire city’s going to see what becomes of you. You’re going to become an example for everyone.”

The man asked no more questions, and the five of them seemed to sag in weary defeat. Eyes haunted, each fell into a private reverie of hopelessness from which there was no way out.

“What’ve you got in mind?” Travis asked.

“I think it’s time to shake things up a little,” he said, turning his back on the tried-and-convicted quintet by the fountain. Only Solomon realized it at the time, but in less than a week it would be the first anniversary of the plague. Although it was a thing of the past, having burned itself out for lack of hosts, surely this was a cause for celebration.

And if that by itself wasn’t enough, the other major thing that had gone his way certainly was. St. Louis, on a limited basis, was due to have electricity again.

Solomon’s months-old offer of a standing reward for anyone who could tackle the job finally paid off when it reached the ear of a recent arrival to the city named Earl Masters. He was a chubby, florid-faced native of Iowa, with numerous aberrant sexual proclivities and a twenty-year background in electrical engineering. He eagerly lapped up Solomon’s proposal. Earl went to work by day, and by night his fantasies were made reality.

Surprisingly, he suggested they ignore the newer power plants serving the area. Too big, too much effort required to operate them, too complicated a process. Instead, he thought they should reactivate one of the smaller, less efficient, older plants around. They were forty to fifty years old, and used infrequently in the pre-plague days but nevertheless operational. Earl settled on one a few miles north of the Poplar Street Bridge, along the Mississippi. He needed a few weeks to acquaint himself with the place. In theory, all electrical plants ran pretty much the same way, but they all had their own quirks. He pored over volumes of plant manuals, spent hours peering at electrical line maps of the area.

As well, he needed time to train a crew to staff the newly operational facility. It would take roughly one hundred able souls to get the kilowatts rolling. Only four or five would actually be needed in the control room, to oversee the generation and output. The rest would be needed for more strenuous jobs of system maintenance and coal handling to drive the turbines.

Coal…there was another matter. In the old world, most plants tried to stockpile a thirty-day supply; more when wage talks with miners came up and a strike was possible. Thus, enough coal should’ve been stockpiled at various plants in the region to get them through several months. Maybe even a few years, since the needs were greatly reduced. But coal would still be a finite resource, Earl warned, and miners would again be needed someday. For now, he would stretch what they had and could get as far as he could, switching the breakers and shutting down lines to entire sections of the city and routing the electricity along the most efficient lines possible…but the coal mines would someday need reopening.

For now, however, they had enough to get things bright again. Earl said all he needed was another few days, and Solomon recounted this with a smile of anticipation.

“Yes, I think it’s time to shake things up,” he told Travis. “And
I’ve been feeling a little show business in my blood.”

* *

It was just another day at Brannigan’s, identical to all the others that had been piling up behind them. June twenty-second, a Wednesday, as if dates mattered anymore. A day whose tasks and obligations were the same as the day before, and the day before that. Just another day…until they were visited by an enemy who for most of them had remained faceless so far. Until they
walked onto the fifth floor with Sam Dunne, the sole guard because a couple months ago they’d started posting only one. A shotgun barrel was snug against Sam’s reddening ear.

“Top-notch security system you got worked out here.”

Everyone who called the place home froze. The enemy walks among us.

Erika, on cooking detail for the week, stood behind the counter in what served as the kitchen. Fresh strawberries, picked from fields across in Illinois, stained her fingers red as she sliced them into a big bowl. She looked at the paring knife in her hand. Not much of a weapon against the firepower newly arrived in their midst.

Some of the men she recognized. Travis Lane, of course, the one who’d initially spoken. Others who’d been with him the day of the executions across from Union Station. And the lean man with the silvery blond hair. He turned, and she felt his eyes upon her, not as she might the leer of someone whose gaze ended at her body, but as the stare of someone who could squirm inside her mind as easily as he entered the room.

Don’t look at me that way,
she thought.
Because
… She left it incomplete. It was too dangerous to acknowledge.

Travis’s men fanned out, and those still in their rooms were hustled out to the main floor, and as she watched what could very well be the last roundup, she wondered what had become of Billy Strickland among this crowd.

I
don’t think they’re going to hurt us,
she then thought.
It doesn’t feel like that. If they were, they wouldn’t have bothered dragging Sam all the way back in.

“This is everybody?” the strange blond man asked.

Erika glanced quickly around the floor, at the people, her family, sitting on the furniture and standing still, each looking small and defenseless, and maybe more than a little ashamed. Everybody? Not quite. Diane McCaffrey had taken Farrah out shopping, as they still called it. Diane had taken an interest in the girl ever since returning from Denver, and especially since Julie had died. Among other things, Farrah was dressing sharper than ever these days.

“Yeah,” said Jack. “This is everybody. Just get to the point.”

“Wait a minute,” Travis said. “Wait a minute wait a minute. Where’s Hart? Jason Hart isn’t here.”

“He’s gone,” Erika said loudly, knowing she had to be the one to pull it off, to feed them the lie and get them to swallow. She had to believe he’d run off in cowardice, tail tucked between his legs. She envisioned scenes of this alternative past that were so clear they were painful, until she was brimming with tears at the prospect of what could’ve been instead of what had been.
Feel the truth, let it hurt, and lie about the rest.
“He left us. Back in March.”

“Bullshit.” It was someone she’d seen before, though changed somehow. His nose was chunky, as if broken and badly healed.

I
wonder if this is
…

Caleb slipped her a wink. So this was the guy Jason had kicked around. The one who had later wielded the lash in reprisal.

“Look around for him some more,” he said in his raw, angry voice. “He’ll be here.” He strode over toward Erika, grinning. “I just got that feeling inside.”

Lucas stopped before her, rifle dangling from his hip. He appraised her with ogling eyes, then grabbed a wrist, lifting her hand up. It was speckled with strawberry pulp. Slowly he pulled her hand closer and licked it, his greasy tongue squelching up her palm. She clenched her eyes shut as her stomach performed an excruciating roll.

“You look good enough to eat,” he whispered. “Now where is he?”

Erika yanked her hand free. If Jason had had the guts to stand up to him, she could try.

“What for?” she asked. “You swing both ways? You want to lick
him
too?”

His eyes narrowed and his mouth curled into a sneer. His arm cocked back, his hand broad and flat and ready to strike. He was an instant from attack when the blond man was behind him, reaching up and seizing Lucas by the wrist, as good as locking him in a vise.

“Temper, Lucas, temper,” he said. “Remember, we’re their guests.”

“Yeah, Jason left us! He left
me
!” Erika suddenly screamed, and really, she didn’t even have to lie. “He left me and it’s your fault,
all
of you assholes, and fuck you all for coming around to remind me of it!”

The blond man released Lucas’s hand, and
everyone
was staring at her. “There you have it,” he said to Lucas. “That’s the pain of someone who’s telling the truth.”

The two of them began to walk away, Lucas glaring at the blond man’s back, then turning to give her one last glower. She matched it venom for venom, maybe even came out on top. But she had to wonder: Why such seeds of dissension between the two of them over her?
What’s it to him if I get my face slapped?
Whatever it was, it was nothing to take comfort in.

Erika stayed put and watched, as did everyone else, while Peter Solomon paced before them and introduced himself, and she finally had a name to pin on him.

“You don’t need to look so frightened,” he told them. “A little frightened? Fine. But not like this. If we’d meant you harm today, it would’ve already come.”

No question about that.

“All I want today is to offer an invitation to you, nothing more. To a celebration. Tomorrow night in Busch Stadium. I trust you know the way. Things should get under way around dusk.” His eyes emptied of their geniality, water down a bottomless drain. “If I were you, I’d be wise enough to make it a point to be there. Me? I get very hurt when people turn me down. And when
I
hurt, I tend to want to hurt back. You don’t want that.”

No, not at all. Surely he’d repay the hurt many times over.

“I’ve seen all your faces now,” he said, slowly scanning every man and woman, adult and child. “And I have an excellent memory. If you have the bad manners not to attend, I’ll know.” Peter Solomon strolled forward, past Caleb, back to Erika. He paused and traced a tender finger lightly down the curve of her cheek. She dared not flinch a muscle. “
You
believe that, don’t you?”

Maybe it was bluff, but she had to give him the benefit of the doubt. For in that deceptively gentle caress lingered more power than she would’ve guessed. Dormant, electric, held behind a sheer membrane of control. And so she forced herself to nod.

He nodded back at her, smiling now. “So lovely, dark, and deep,” he said, then briskly walked away. He motioned to the men he’d brought with him, and was halfway to the escalator by the time any of the rest of them had moved.

“And what if we don’t
go?” Jack Mitchell asked aloud.

Travis glared wearily at him and for a second Erika saw a pained resignation in his eyes. “Just be there,” he said. He looked like a man who knew he was caught in a dead end and had no idea how to get out of it. If he hadn’t done the things he had, she might have felt a touch of pity for him, but no, he was forever beyond that. She wished him only more misery, until the stain of his existence was washed off the face of the earth.