Well Fed - 05 (13 page)

Plush chairs, rugs, even thin pieces of ornamental wood, all felt the lick of the torch, all fed a different kind of beast. The halls became smoky tunnels, which started making Gus cough, the gauzy haze choking his airways. He had no worry about burning himself, but he knew most house-fire deaths occurred from smoke inhalation. The thought that he hadn’t planned out his attack thoroughly enough occurred to him.

The hallway he followed took him into forbidden areas of the house, the smoke billowing. When he finally turned around, the sight made him stop and stare, blinking his unprotected, watering eyes.

He’d unleashed an inferno.

Flames waved merrily from open doorways as if well-wishing his departure, glowing eerily in the rising clouds of smoke. Like any good fire, getting it started was the difficult part, but once it got going, feeding it was your only concern. The rows of bedrooms, libraries, living spaces, linen closets, and everything between possessed plenty of fuel.

“What is it you want?” Mortimer wailed over the loudspeakers. “What? Just
tell
me.”

Fuck you, Mort
.

Gus stepped through another door and entered yet another bedroom. As antisocial as old Mort was, it was difficult to believe he needed so many. A king-size island dominated the center of the room, covered in delicate sheets of what appeared to be mosquito netting––or perhaps some fairy-tale décor beyond Gus’s everyman sensibilities. An adjoining en suite had been sculpted from blinding porcelain, glittering gold light and sink fixtures, and more marble. A glass doorway led to a shutter-free deck outside. Mortimer had the bucks to burn, and that made Gus chuckle. The short laugh got him coughing harder, squinting against the smoke clinging to his ass, and he decided it was time to leave.

He tossed his torch into the en suite, closed the door, and went about stripping off bed sheets. These he quickly cut into strips with his boot knife and tied together, coughing the whole time. Once done, he carried his makeshift rope back to the balcony door, splitting smoke into twirls. Gus stepped outside into the night, gasping at the pure air.

The blaze rumbled against the walls like a low-grade earthquake.

The damn thing caught a whiff of air as well and
liked
it. Couldn’t tell him fires weren’t living creatures.

Gus tied off one end of his makeshift rope to a stumpy granite post and heaved the other over the balcony.

Under a night sky bristling with stars, he clumsily rappelled to the ground, three stories below. He crunch-landed in a wiry hedge of some sort. Once free of it, he realized he stood at the back of the house. Coughing out the smoke in his lungs and feeling positively polluted by the bitter fumes, he took a moment to stop and watch flashes and flickers behind dark windows.

Mortimer’s voice was noticeably absent.

The night twinkled, at times clouded by cottony wisps.

Gus walked away, aware of his aches.

Any moment, he expected an arrow in the back or his face, exposed by the missing visor. Perhaps even a zombie might shamble out from the darkness, or even better, one on fire. Nothing of the sort happened, however, and in a few long minutes of following the wall of the house, he circled back to the paved driveway and spied Talbert’s minivan and his beige SUV.

Gus sagged into the driver’s seat, utterly exhausted and relieved to be inside. The higher windows of the mansion flashed fire every so often, catching his attention. Mortimer’s immense home would take hours to burn, and as much as Gus wanted to sit and watch, he decided against it. He’d destroyed a man’s castle that night, and an odd sense of déjà vu haunted the darker corners of his mind. If Mortimer was in a panic room of sorts, he’d have to leave it before the fire trapped him, and trap him it would, eventually. If he was being truthful, and Gus suspected Morty incapable of lying, the reclusive billionaire was probably well on in years.

Perhaps even ancient.

In time, the floors would fall into the lower ones, and if left unchecked, Mortimer would be homeless by the morning.

If he survived the barbeque.

Fingers on the steering wheel, Gus found the keys left in the ignition and started the machine.

The dashboard clock displayed 4:56.

Five in the morning. The sky was as black as if the sun had burned itself dry and left the world spinning.

Gus put the SUV into gear and drove away from the burning mansion, not the least interested in watching an old man’s final bastion perish in the dawn’s light. He hit the 101 in short time and drove perhaps twenty kilometers before his body demanded he stop and rest.

He parked the vehicle at the top of a low incline, his muscles aching. The rearview mirror revealed the glow from the massive conflagration, large enough to be seen kilometers away.

Gus watched it as his eyelids grew heavy.

He dreamed of fire.

The sun blazed through the fogged-up windshield like a prison spotlight, waking Gus. The dashboard clock stated the time as 10:42 a.m. He eased himself out of the SUV with a moan, knowing Donald had gotten in his share of punishing licks. For the next fifteen minutes, Gus extracted himself from the Nomex and threw it into the back of the vehicle. The farm was too far away to drive home wearing the heavy gear, too uncomfortable. Once it was off, he pulled on a light windbreaker. The black sweater and jeans he’d worn underneath the Nomex stank of sweat.

In the distance, black rolling clouds marred the morning sky as if evil incarnate stirred a huge cauldron just beyond the hills.

He tuned out for a short time, listening to the twittering of hidden birds. Weeds sprouted through cracks in the pavement. A few derelict cars littered the highway.

Empty.

Gus got into the SUV.

The drive back home relaxed him despite his hurts, and twice he pulled over to nap, the solemn landscape lulling him to sleep. Upon waking, he made the mental note to have Maggie take a look at him. Gus resumed driving. Thoughts of Talbert and his frat crew lingered as he rolled down the final strip of highway to the farm—even old Mortimer and his boys. Also, the loss of what had been a very valuable piece of property in the mansion recalled his own house a long time before. His mountain fortress took his mind off the driving, and he went a good ways before noticing black curls of smoke rising up on the right, over a wall of trees, vile and polluting the deep blue of the otherwise empty sky.

They twisted and coiled, blotting the air currents, worrying him. Gus sped up, watching the sky and road while a growing dread urged him on. Every bump in the highway traveled up the steering column and rattled him a little bit more. In seconds, he spotted the farm’s dirt road and turned onto it at just after two thirty in the afternoon. Dirt sprayed from his tires. Unfilled potholes made his back teeth clatter.

A flock of crows took to the sky, swearing at having to do so. The farm loomed into view, and Gus’s innards crystallized at the sight. He braked, hearing the crackle of cold gravel underneath steel-belted rubber.

The four corners of the main house stood charred and blackened like greased spits over a low-burning fire. The blaze had consumed the house right down to its bones, where the interior was a smoking pile of unrecognizable debris. Part of the second floor sloped down to the ground level like a charcoal slide. Chrome gleamed from what remained of the kitchen, along with the singed hide of a once-yellow refrigerator.

Gus’s breath sped up as if he’d burst into a sprint even though he hadn’t even put his ride into park. He did so a moment later, adrenaline flooding his system as he fumbled for the stick and swore when he finally got it right.

Then he saw the bodies.

He stumbled from the SUV and walked across the bloodstained ground as if gut shot, whimpering in terror. Smoke drifted across the corpses, but Gus knew them. The sight of all those people he’d known switched him off in complete shock, like the sound of a two-ton weight crashing down on an elegant set of piano keys right at his back. About thirteen bodies sprawled on the ground, and he felt as if Donald had put one last arrow through the frontal jelly portion of his brain. Gus’s knees buckled, and he plopped down on the gravel, staring at the corpses, seeing how the crows had violated them.

He covered his mouth and stared until his eyes blazed red.

“Oh
shit
,” he squeaked, grief rendering him breathless. “Oh shit. Oh, oh
shit
. Oh…”

Crows shrieked somewhere in the distance, their harsh cries sawing at reality. If he had a shotgun, he’d silence the whole goddamn works. But that swell of murderous intent receded, leaving him sitting and gawking at the rows of the dead, peeping out throat-constricted grunts of disbelief.

They’d been executed; that much was clear.

He wondered who had done it.
Mortimer?
Gus couldn’t believe that. He’d left the old man to roast. Not even his ghost would know the location of the farm.

Then another shot of fear, pure and mind-splitting, widened his red-rimmed eyes.

“Oh my
shit
,” Gus whispered with emotion. He got up, staggered to the bodies, and tried to clarify what exactly he was seeing.

Adam lay facedown with a gaping hole in the back of his skull, blood caking and forever tarnishing the silvery gloss of his hair. Gus didn’t turn him over for fear of seeing what the blast had done to his face. Anita Little lay two bodies over, her one eye as brown as the dirt she so closely studied in death. Her gray hair splayed around her shoulders in muddy strands, and memories assaulted Gus of how she’d fidgeted with her locks like a little girl. The others he recognized by hair or body shape or face partially blotted by the ground. Cory, Emma, Louise, Art, Mike, Clara, Elmo…

Gus stopped, palm-wiping his eyes and nose. A rueful growl ripped from his chest, and he inspected the bodies again, forcing himself to continue.

He had to make sure.

No Maggie.

No Roger.

No Thelma.

And
no kids
. Becky and Chad weren’t among the dead, and that little burst of relief gave him strength. The thought came to him right then, as he stood as still as a tombstone, that if anyone was lurking, he’d have known already. They could have picked him off. As it was, he’d only been gone overnight, not even two days, and the farm had been ravaged.

He stepped back from the dead, noting how they’d been either shot or brutally bludgeoned to death. Mike Julian, a New Minas native Gus used to talk shop with, lay facedown with his right hand hacked off. Tortured, perhaps.

Gus walked around the dying fire pit of the house, spotting the dirt mound where his chair had toppled. A pair of boots jutted into the air, out of place against the far-off tree line. Roger lay on his back, staring at the sun with a bloody hole through his chest. The crows had been picking at his ruddy cheeks, plucking the eyes, displaying what hooked beaks could do to an unmoving knob of meaty flesh.

Gus almost collapsed right there.

But he didn’t. He pushed on and confirmed four people were indeed unaccounted for among the deceased.

So where were they?

The question flared in his mind.
Where were they?

Gus frantically searched for signs of
anything
—behind the house, around the equally torched barn, the storage sheds, and the immediate fields. The little storehouse full of harvested foods preserved for the winter had been razed to the ground. The root cellar remained intact but emptied of its treasures. The few cars parked around the property had been cooked to husks, dashboards melted into grimaces. Most of the livestock––cows and goats––had been released to the fields where they grazed peacefully, unconcerned with the deaths. The chickens were gone.

And then he came to Adam’s old beater of a sedan––roasted on the spot.

A buzzing grew in his ears as Gus headed to his SUV. He jumped aboard the vehicle, started it, and was about to slam it into drive when the farm stopped him.

The sad, shocking picture of it all.

The smoking remains of his home and of the people with whom he’d shared it for almost two years slammed into his chest and robbed him of his voice.

Have to bury them
, he thought.
Have to bury them.

And he would. He swore he would—swore to whatever ghosts were lurking nearby he’d return. The urge to leave grew almost irresistible, but then he composed himself with a mighty breath and got the machine rolling.

I’ll be back
, he vowed.

Tires spun dirt as he whipped the SUV around and rumbled to the main drag. Trees flashed by. Potholes made him bounce in his seat, his head nearly connecting with the ceiling.

Questions raced through his mind.
Who did this?
Where were the missing people? Were they nearby?

Dirt merged with pavement up ahead, and Gus still had enough presence of mind to spot a clue he’d missed. He slammed on the brakes and leaned over the steering wheel, barely hearing the idling of the motor.

In the dirt lay the jagged parallel curves of tire tracks, tearing off the back road and peeling off on asphalt. A spray of gravel marked the speed and power the fleeing vehicle used. Gus could almost hear the
yeehaw
ing as the driver gunned the pedal, shooting over pavement in a squeal of scalding rubber. Black scars marked the road, heading north on the 101.

Toward Annapolis.

Smoke.
He’d been staring at smoke when he turned off the road, completely missing the obvious.

Someone had come upon the farm—someone willing to kill, to loot.

But why had they taken only four?

The answer hit him between the eyes. He couldn’t be sure about Becky and Chad, but Maggie was priceless. She was a doctor in the old world. She was also training Thelma as her nurse. In the
new
world, anyone would be hard-pressed to find such a valuable pair.

They’d been kidnapped. Perhaps the kids were taken to be used as leverage, to press Maggie into performing without argument.

Gus looked ahead, measuring the curves in the road until trees on either side forbade his sight. The gas tank indicated half-empty.