Time Spike: Chapter Twenty Four

    Terry Collins whistled softly as he walked toward the armory. Things were working out perfectly. The Indian with his sob story had been the icing on the cake. Captain Blacklock, along with over two-thirds of the guards, was gone. They were off to save the world, the silly bastards.

    Collins gave a small chuckle and slowed his pace. He wanted to enjoy the night. It was beautiful. The sky was clear of clouds, giving him a spectacular view of the heavens. He had never realized how many stars there actually were. The moon was just as impressive. It was full and golden.

    If he’d still been a kid he would have skipped across the parking lot, or tossed a rock at the man in the moon, just for the joy of it. He hesitated. Grinned. Bent and retrieved a rock.

    But when he looked up at the sky once more, the mood was gone. There was work to do. The rock fell from his hand.

    He knew from the shift roster, which Joe Schuler had so kindly given him a copy of, that the armory was unmanned. Almost everything was unmanned. The sixty-four guards still inside the walls had been divided up into two twelve-hour shifts—forty guards on days, twenty-four on nights. He suppressed the urge to laugh out loud. This was going to be like taking candy from a baby.

    He didn’t bother to look around, to check if anyone could see him. If they did, so what? He was the night supervisor, making his rounds. He was just being thorough.

    He pulled a key ring from his pocket and flipped through the keys till he found the one he was looking for. Unlocking the door, he felt a twinge of doubt, but suppressed it. If Andy Blacklock stayed in charge they were going to spend their lives working like dogs, and for what? To keep a bunch of guys who weren’t worth the air they breathed alive and locked up? No. It was crazy.

    The prisoners needed to be released, or shot. That simple.

    Oh, he had heard the arguments. If they were released they couldn’t be given guns and ammo, so that meant they would starve. And those that didn’t would freeze if this time and place had a winter. They wouldn’t be able to build a shelter and gather enough firewood to make it through even a mild cold snap. Winter could be too close. As for prisoners being released and allowed to stay inside the prison, that was an impossibility. There weren’t enough guards to keep things controlled.

    Well, keeping them fed and watered till spring was not an option.

    Everyone would starve.

    This was a primitive time. Survival of the fittest, and he intended to be one of the survivors. If Andy Blacklock and Joe Schuler and Rod Hulbert were too stupid or weak to do what had to be done, that was too bad for them. He wasn’t. He could do what needed doing and it wouldn’t keep him up at night.

    He stepped through the armory’s door and closed it behind him before turning his flashlight on. He had a right to be here, but there was no sense in advertising his location. He glanced at his watch. He was well ahead of schedule. Luff had already been given his key to the cell-house and a hand drawn map. In one hour he would unlock the door and then he and his boys would remove the guard and make their way to the armory. The guard would be easy to take out. He didn’t have a gun, a nightstick, nothing. Not even a can of pepper spay. His protection was a battery-operated radio whose battery had been removed twenty minutes ago.

    That was another example of Andy Blacklock’s stupidity. Sure, in the world they’d come from, guards didn’t carry guns inside the prison. That was standard procedure. No gun meant no prisoner could take it from a guard and then be armed. Well, that might have made sense when the world was still outside the walls. But now, the rules needed to be changed.

    When Joe suggested that change, Andy had shot him down. “No. That rule is there for a good reason. We can’t afford to panic.”

    Blacklock just didn’t get it. He didn’t understand how much things had changed. But he would. When he got back and found his prison was now Collins’ fortress, he would finally catch on.

    If he got back at all. Collins wouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t. A man who couldn’t figure out what to do with a prison filled with cons, sure as hell wouldn’t know how to handle a bunch of marauders and wild Indians.

    Collins checked the shift roster once more, just to make sure he hadn’t overlooked anything. He grinned again when he saw Marie Keehn’s name scratched off. Obviously, that had been done at the last minute. Hulbert must have gotten his way, and taken the little honey with him.

    Collins couldn’t blame him. Marie Keehn was fine-looking. Not as fine as Casey Fisher, though, whom Collins had already picked out as his own.

    Andy Blacklock had left them forty women. Collins had made it plain to Luff that all forty of them were to be taken alive. Even the old, ugly ones. That had been the one and only point the bastard hadn’t argued about.

    He checked his watch once more. A half-hour to go.

    He unlocked the doors to the cabinet, and left them standing open. He pulled out the vests and the helmets, and then took down the radios. These were C.E.R.T. radios, set to their own channel. The guards wouldn’t be listening to that channel. Collins and his people could keep in touch, and no one would know.

    Adrian Luff turned the key, heard the click and gave a little sigh of relief. He hadn’t dared try it any earlier. Getting too anxious had caused more than one solid plan to disintegrate. Using his mirror he checked the hall to be sure the guard was nowhere to be seen.

    It was clear.

    He moved down the row of cells, unlocking each door as he passed it. The men inside were expecting him. None of them made a sound. Instead, they stepped out and fell into line behind him. They carried their shoes. Many of them also carried jury-rigged weapons made from whatever material they had managed to locate. He came to the end of the row less than five minutes after leaving his cell.

    He passed a key to the man behind him and motioned for him to go up the metal stairs to the third floor. The rest of the men followed him to the ground level. The guard had just finished rounds, so he would be at the desk. The idiots still did their paperwork. There was no administrative aide who was ever going to read it, but they did it just the same.

    Howard Earl Jameson looked up just as Luff cleared the last step. He snatched up his radio and keyed the send button, shouting a warning to the other guards. But the radio was dead, of course.

    Luff waved at the guard. Three prisoners moved toward him, blocking his way to the door. The short struggle that followed didn’t last long. Once it was over, the guard lay on the floor, tied up with a cord clipped from a now useless television. His keys were in Luff’s pocket, his flashlight in Luff’s hand.

    “Let’s move,” Adrian said.

    One of the prisoners took off down the cellblock releasing the men on the lower level. These were the men chosen for tonight, and for the months ahead. Most of them were smarter than the average con and all of them had backgrounds that Luff thought would be useful in this new world. And they included, of course, all the men who had become part of Luff’s informal organization.

    That was something Luff hadn’t bothered to explain to Collins. He had let the man think they were being chosen because of their fighting prowess. Collins was another idiot. He couldn’t think past tonight. He couldn’t see they were going to need farmers and soldiers, mechanics and laborers, everything you could think of.

    Collins had insisted the women be spared and Adrian had agreed. What Collins didn’t know was that none of the guards were going to die if Luff could help it. Including the male guards whom Collins obviously expected were going to be murdered on the spot.

    Not tonight, anyway. Not until he discovered who was useful and who was not. Who could make things run. Who could build things.

    Tonight was the easy part.

    The hard part was months down the road. Actually, it was years from now. Running water and sewers and baked bread with jam. Those were the things that gave life a quality Luff wasn’t anxious to live without. He didn’t mind doing it for a while, but he wasn’t going to do it forever. Before he was busted, he had made a good living as an accountant for a manufacturing company that made specialty parts for machinery. He hadn’t worked the floor. He didn’t have those skills, but he knew men who could look at a drawing and two weeks later hand you a functioning machine.

    And that’s what he had to know about the guards they captured, before any of them were killed. Who was working this hellhole because the economy sucked, their old line of work had dried up, and they needed cold hard cash to meet the mortgage?

    Once he sifted through the guards he would go through the prisoners. Some of them would be men of talent who happened to fall on the wrong side of the law. But, prisoner or guard, it didn’t matter to Luff. As long as they had a skill that was usable, they could live. After he knew who was who, who had those talents and skills, then he would thin the numbers, but not one minute before he was sure.

    He motioned for everyone to put their shoes on. If things went right, they wouldn’t have to worry about noise from this point on. When the last man gave him a heads up, he turned the knob on the door and pushed it open.

    He stopped halfway through the door, startled. This was the first time he’d been outside his cell since the Quiver. The fresh air felt good on his skin, and in his lungs. The sky was prettier than he remembered.

    Then he noticed the slight chill in the wind. He had heard winter might be coming. This was late November, pre-Quiver time. Now, no one knew. Everyone just guessed and hoped.

    He moved on. The weather wouldn’t change anything that happened tonight. June or January, it didn’t matter. Tonight he had to take the prison.

    When Collins had approached him with his plan to take command, Luff had agreed. Partly because he preferred being in charge to being incarcerated, but more because he was afraid to turn him down. If Collins succeeded, he’d be the one deciding who got culled and who didn’t.  He might easily decide that there wasn’t any use for an accountant in their new world.

    So, Adrian had agreed. He’d even encouraged the fool.

    He’d had to do more than encourage, soon enough. Collins really wasn’t very bright. Adrian had had to baby him along. Patiently explaining what was needed, over and over. Explaining and arguing. Pushing him to make all the steps, not letting him take any shortcuts.

    Walking through the grounds, moving quickly, using Jameson’s keys as they came to doors that had been left unguarded, they made their way to the armory. The map Collins had given him was good. So was the route. They did not run into one guard from the time they left the cell-block until they stepped into the door of the small block building twenty minutes later.

    “You’re early,” Collins said, frowning at his watch. “Ten minutes.”

    Luff nodded. “It went better than we thought it would.”

    “You took care of Jameson?”

    “Yeah.” Luff looked at the room beyond the entry area. “He won’t be a problem.”

    “I bet not.” Collins chuckled and shook his head. “Okay, the easy part’s over. You and your boys are about to earn your keep.”

    “How many are on duty, and how many are in their bunks?”

    When Collins told him, Luff gave a low whistle. “Are you sure?”

    “Sure I’m sure. Everyone not on duty is beat. They’ve been pulling twelve-hour shifts ever since the Quiver. They’re sacked out in A-block. You send a few guys in there with repeating rifles, and you’ll have them before they’ve had a chance to roll out of their bedrolls.”

    “And the other twenty-four?”

    “You only have eighteen left to worry about. You’ve already got Jameson. Marie Keehn went with Hulbert and I’m right here.” He looked at his list. “Kathleen Hanrahan’s on maternity; she’s just had a kid. And Elaine Brown is still out of it. She’s the C.O. Boyd Chrissman nailed. They’re both in the infirmary with two of the three nurses.” Collins snickered. “Blacklock left the two old crones and took the honey with him. They’re both as old as dirt, and look like shit. But what the hell. I’ll take care of them myself.”

    Luff took the roster and looked at it. “Casey Fisher, she’s their guard. I take it you plan to take care of her, too.”

    Collins shrugged.

    “Okay. You go to the infirmary. But remember, you’re the one who made the rule: none of the women are to be hurt.”

    “Killed,” Collins said.

    “We’ll need the nurses. I don’t want any of them hurt. Are you understanding me?”

    “Not a problem. I won’t lay a finger on either of the nurses.”

    “Or the guards, or the kid,” Luff said forcefully. “You have a job to do tonight. No horsing around. And I mean that. We take the prison tonight. We take it, and then we get ourselves in a position to hold it.”

    He saw the resentment well up in the man, resentment and suspicion. It would be just like the stupid bastard to start an argument in front of everybody. Adrian needed to defuse this, for the moment.

    He gave the big prison guard a friendly clap on the arm. “Hey, man, relax. We’ll party big tomorrow. You want that guard, that Casey Fisher, she’s yours. Tomorrow. Tonight, we’ve got work to do. And the first thing we’re going to do is take A-block. After that, while we mop up, you can take care of the infirmary.”

    Collins nodded, but Luff knew the man had no plans to wait. He was dumb as a rock. Before this night was over they might need those nurses’ cooperation. Luff knew the two women in the infirmary. He had been sent to clean the clinic a few times before the Quiver, and he’d seen them work. They did a good job under pressure, but if they were scared, they’d cave. If Collins hurt that baby or raped one of the women guards in front of them, neither nurse would be any good after that for days.

    Well, this was a simple problem. After Collins turned away, Luff gave Butch Wesson a small hand signal that said: stick close; I have a job for you.

    There really wasn’t any reason at all that Collins needed to stay alive any longer. Adrian was tempted to just shoot him in the back right now and be done with it. But a gunshot might alert the guards sleeping in A-block. And he was leading a bunch of cons. Even though he’d picked them personally, some of them were still a little unpredictable. If they saw the leadership fall apart right in front of them, one shooting the other, they might get their own ideas.

    No, better to do it quietly. By the time most of the cons found out, it would be a done deal—and Luff’s authority would be enhanced rather than undermined.

    James Cook reached up for the six-inch metal bar from the small opening the health examiner required for ventilation in the cell house, that had come loose during the Quiver. He’d taken it down from time to time and had patiently filed the end to a reasonably sharp point, and then placed it back. He just wanted to make sure the sharpened bar was still loose and would come easily into his hand if he needed it. Which he figured he would, with a prisoner uprising underway led by Adrian Luff.

    “Boom,” he whispered into the dark, “we’re trapped like a couple of bug-eyed flies on fly-paper.”

    “Yeah, I know. You got anything useful to say?”

    Cook watched the black giant roll off the bottom bunk and press his ear to the floor. The cell-house was empty. They were the only two still behind bars.

    “They be a lot of blood spillin’ soon. You afraid?”

    Cook chewed on his bottom lip, not sure what to say. To admit fear was to admit to a weakness, a very stupid move when behind bars. But the Boom wasn’t exactly a normal con. Honesty could just as easily be what the giant was after. In the end he decided on a non-answer. “Do I look stupid?”

    The giant shook his head. “Nah. You be one of the smart ones.” He sat up facing the bars. “Half the guards is gone. And the whole world is gone. All that’s left is us and the monsters outside the walls.”

    Just to keep his mind off his fear, James blurted out an idle question he’d been wondering about.

    “How’d a black man wind up with an Italian last name like Bolgeo, anyway?”

    As soon as he asked the question, he realized what a stupid thing it’d been to say. You never knew exactly what might set off Boomer’s temper. Most of the time, the huge man was genial enough. His boys all called him “Uncle Timmy” and the only thing you usually had to watch out for was his cut-throat killer way of playing spades. But when he did lose his temper, the results were legendary. The man must be pushing sixty, but he was still hard-bodied despite his enormous size, and he was almost literally as strong as a bull.

    Fortunately, the Boom just chuckled. “Well, they be two theories in the family ‘bout that. One of them is that Great-grandpa Luigi was an Eye-talian. The other is that Great-grandpa was a high yeller nigger passing as an Eye-talian, who invented the name. I hold to the second theory, myself.”

    “Ah.” That seemed safe enough.

    “Now it’s my turn to be nosy. What you in here for?”

    “Second degree murder. I got charged with first degree, but the jury wouldn’t go for it.”

    “You had a trial?”

    Most convicts didn’t. Their sentences resulted from plea bargaining. James’ public defender had urged him to do the same, but James had refused. Stupid, probably, but he hadn’t seen where he could do anything else.

    “Did you do it?”

    That question was so astonishing that James’ jaw almost dropped.  Cons didn’t ask each other if they were guilty or not, because nobody except a fool would try to claim he was innocent in a prison. Didn’t matter if he was or not. That was another form of weakness, and you never showed weakness.

    The Boom really was an odd one. Of course, with his size and capacity for fury, he could afford to be odd.

    With anyone else, James would have just issued a non-committal grunt. With Boomer, though…

    “No, I didn’t.”

    “You was framed?”

    James barked a sarcastic laugh. “Oh, come on, Boom! ‘Framed’? The cops don’t bother to frame Injuns. Or niggers, or greasers. Or poor white trash, for that matter. The prosecutor had a killing to clear off his docket, I was a handy suspect who fit the bill and didn’t have an alibi, and there it was. Their case was weak enough that the jury wouldn’t go for a first degree, but they found me guilty of second.”

    “What happened?”

    “I was in a bar one night. Friday night, after work. It’d been a bad day and I was pretty much tying one on. Which was stupid, because when I’m in a bad mood like that I can lose my temper if I’ve drunk too much. Sure enough. Some asshole starting ragging me, I got pissed, chose him out, we stepped outside and I beat the crap out of him.”

    He took a deep breath. Even now, he still got angry thinking about it. “But that was it. We fought, I won—hands down—he was lying on the ground with a slip lip and a buncha bruises, and it was over. My hands hurt and I felt stupid as hell. So I went back into bar, paid my tab and went home to sleep it off.”

    He took another deep breath. “Which I did. The next morning the cops were at my door arresting me for first degree murder. Seems the asshole went to another bar afterward and got himself killed about three hours later. They found him in the parking lot with the back of his head caved in. Probably from a baseball bat.”

    Boomer nodded. “And nobody saw you come home and could vouch for your whereabouts.”

    “Yep. They said they had motive, method and opportunity.” He spit into a corner. “Never mind that the motive didn’t make any sense. I’d already whipped the guy, for chrissake, so why would I be seeking ‘revenge’? I won, he lost, it’s over. Never mind that they never found the murder weapon. Never mind that no eyewitnesses ever placed me at that other bar. Never mind that I’d never heard of that other bar and nobody had ever seen me there.”

    He shrugged. “But you know how it is. I had a juvie record. Nothing really heavy, but enough to made me look like a bad boy. I’m not white. I’m not a person of color from a so-called good family. I had no alibi. It was an easy case for the prosecutor, and he didn’t give a flying fuck whether I was guilty or not. Hell, neither did my own so-called lawyer.”

    “That how it is.” The Boom started laughing softly. “But that all behind us now, boy. We in a new world that ain’t got no prosecutors. Just Adrian Luff and his goons and a buncha dinosaurs.”

    After a while, James started laughing too.

    Lieutenant Joe Schuler lay on the narrow bunk, tossing and turning, feeling every lump of the mattress and every wrinkle in the blanket. The pillows weren’t right. One was too low; two was too high. He glanced at the chair he was using as a nightstand. The small wind up clock he’d borrowed from Woeltje showed he still had four hours of sleep-time. Too many to just call it a short night and get up.

    He closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to stare at the ceiling and tried to relax. He had been asleep earlier, but it hadn’t been restful. He had been dreaming in short, unrelated clips that his brain pretended fit together. The type of dream you seldom remembered. But this one had been a rerun, so he remembered too much of it. He was with Maria, before the split. They were on a picnic.

    He lay there thinking about that. The two of them had never taken a picnic to the beach. Not once. He hadn’t had the time, and she was just as busy. It had always been fast food, or eating at home to save money. It had been his mother who liked picnics and his father who would load everything up in the car and drive the thirty minutes it took to get the family to her favorite spot. A small park sitting next to a creek. The trees were old oaks filled with acorns, birds and squirrels. Joe and his brother, Keith, would play on the swings and monkey bars, occasionally sneaking a look at their parents lying on a blanket staring at the sky, or sometimes each other. He started drifting away, back to his dreams, wondering if Maria went on picnics with her new husband.

    Marie Keehn knelt on the flat rubber roof located on the administration building’s new wing. Below her were the offices that use to be payroll; above her was the sky. A portrait of infinity. She spread her bedroll out and laid down. It was just chilly enough to make for good sleeping weather. She had thought about sleeping inside A-block with the others, then changed her mind.

    She wanted to be alone. She needed time to think.

    Hulbert was what she needed to think about. He was in love. It showed. And she wasn’t so sure she wanted that. The fact that he fell so quickly hadn’t surprised her. She thought men usually did. She’d read an article in a women’s magazine once, explaining how it took most men less than two minutes to fall madly in love, and she thought the article had it right.

    It took most women much longer, the article had said. Many of them were actually married for a year or so before they realized just how much they loved their husbands. Women were considered the romantics, but in reality they tended to be a lot more practical with their hearts. It was men who jumped in with both feet to sink or swim.

    And she liked it that way. It felt right to her. Especially now.

    Her grandmother had told her once that a man had to love a woman enough to die for her. And a woman had to love the man enough to live her life for him. That had struck a cord in Marie. It suited something in her personality.

    And it was why she was still single. She had been waiting for that man who would lay down his life rather than let her die. And she had been looking for someone she could wrap her life around. As her dear old grandmother used to say, someone worth giving up the she and becoming the we for.

    She didn’t know how she felt about Hulbert. She knew without a doubt he would step between her and death. He had already done it. Without his quick reflexes she would have been killed when by that scary cat-thing. It was the other half of the deal that worried her. The giving up of the she. The becoming a we.

    She knew the smart women, the ones with good marriages, had remained themselves. They hadn’t become clones of the men in their lives. But the “we” had still taken first place. And if that meant changing a few things, that was fine. They made the changes. If that meant talking or raising hell till the man did something important for the “we,” then they did that too. It was work. And with the world turned upside down right now she wasn’t sure it was a job she wanted to take on.

    She knew Hulbert had started the trip to the field already infatuated. The physical attraction, the chemistry, had been there, drawing them together. Then the other things happened: starting a fire, finding a set of prints, skinning out, reducing meat down to its usable parts, easy to transport. And then came the talking of tomorrow and of yesterday and the working together on the today.

    And Hulbert had been caught, and she was walking around the edges of it, teetering.

    “What the hell, girl. Quit lying. You fell.” She laughed at herself. Yeah, if she hadn’t fallen, she wouldn’t be on a rooftop in the middle of the night thinking about her grandmother’s old fashion sayings and wondering if the name Marie Louise Hulbert sounded right.