Time Spike: Chapter Twenty Seven

    Adrian Luff sat behind the large desk that had once belonged to the warden, staring at the clock on the wall.

    The generator had died six hours ago. There was still fuel, so that wasn’t the problem. But nobody Luff could find knew how to fix whatever was wrong with it.

    The second hand wasn’t moving. The computer didn’t work. Even the pencil sharpener sat dead and useless in front of him. Nothing electrical worked, unless it had a battery backand half the battery-operated equipment was down.

    The world was completely, totally, one hundred percent fucked up.

    He was out of his cell, but still couldn’t go anywhere. And if he did decide to get the hell out of Dodge, then what? The dinosaurs outside the prison were carnivorous. They ate meat. He was meat. And since he wasn’t one of those great white hunters, he was going nowhere.

    Besides, there was nowhere to go. There were no towns. There was no reason to leave. Bad as it was, the prison was the safest place that existed in this crazy new world. At least the dinosaurs couldn’t get through the walls.

    He hefted a small red ball he’d found in the bottom drawer of the desk. He’d spent some time earlier tossing the ball at the wall. It would hit the dark paneling with a satisfying thump, touch the floor half way between the wall and the chair he sat in, and then bounce close enough for him to catch it without getting up. That had helped steady his nerves, which needed it.

    The takeover hadn’t gone as planned. They hadn’t hung on to any of the guards. Worse yet, none of the nurses. They had the methane outhouses, but no one knew how to operate and maintain them. Said they didn’t, anyway. Adrian was pretty sure at least one of the Boom’s boys would know how to make them work. But that would require a deal and Adrian wasn’t sure he wanted to deal with Boomer. He hadn’t decided on that yet.

    There was a greenhouse filled with dirt, but no one knew if it had been planted or if it was just sitting there, waiting for seeds. Chuck Reed was a farmer and he said he could figure it out. But Reed was half-crazy. He also said he owned a ten thousand acre cattle ranch in southern Texas and was descended from old Spanish hidalgos, when everybody knew he’d been born and raised near Mattoon and had had a hardscrabble farm that barely made him a living.

    There were pills and sprays and ointments, but no nurses who knew how to use them. Just that freaky new guy, Cook. He probably knew, but that was going to take more dealing. Right now, Luff was in no mood to deal.

    There were no women of any kind.

    That was what most the men were focused on right now. The women had slipped through their fingers. But Luff wasn’t really worried about that. Soon enough, they’d accept the fact. A lot of them had been without a woman for so long they didn’t even miss it anymore. They just liked the idea. It was a taste of normal. Whatever that was.

    In a day or two, though, they would start focusing on the other stuff, and when they did he was going to have trouble keeping them in line. Things weren’t the way he had envisioned. The food shortage was going to produce a crisis soon. The amount of ammunition on hand was nowhere near enough. Hell, the only thing they had going for them was the well. And even that was primitive. The water had to be dipped with a bucket on a rope, one bucket at a time

    There was equipment and tools inside the machine shop that looked as though it had been separated out for some purpose. But he didn’t know for what. None of the men he had could make sense of the stack. Some of it looked like it might be farm equipment, but Reed’s only contribution had been to insist the guards had been putting together a time machine so that they could escape.

    Luff’s only hope was that once the interview of the prisoners began he would strike gold and come up with a dozen or so who had the skills he and his men were going to need in order to survive in this new world. Then he wouldn’t need to deal with the Boom at all.

    He swiveled his chair a little to face the three men on the other side of the desk. They were the three he’d decided would make the best lieutenants, although he wasn’t sure about one of them. That was Danny Bostic.

    “How many we got?” he asked.

    Jimmy Walker looked at his list. “Twenty-two hundred and forty-six prisoners, in total. Three-hundred and eighty-four of them can be shot today. They’re waterheads. Totally useless. There are another hundred and thirty-one men too old to work. Most of them have been here since they were in their twenties, anyway. They wouldn’t know anything useful that any con doesn’t know. They could also be gotten rid of.”

    Luff did the math in his head. Five hundred and fifteen who could be eliminated as soon as possible, bringing the number of prisoners down to one thousand, seven hundred and thirty-one. That would cull a lot of the dead weight right off the bat, and ease the pressure on everything.

    It would also set the tone. It was important to set the right tone, and do it at the start. That would prevent misunderstandings.

    Luff nodded. “Okay. Start making the arrangements.”

    Walker started out the door.

    “Jimmy,” Luff called.

    The man stopped.

    “I don’t want them shot. We can’t afford the ammo. Slit their throats, hang them, chop their fucking heads off with an axe, I don’t care. Just don’t waste any bullets.”

    Walker nodded and left, closing the door behind him.

    “Why don’t we just turn them out?” Danny Bostic asked.

    The third man nodded. That was Phil Haggerty. “Be the easiest way, Adrian. Without supplies or guns, they wouldn’t last long and we wouldn’t have to worry about them.”

    “Can’t,” said Luff. “They aren’t all stupid. Too many of them would run right to Blacklock. And some of the others might wind up with the Indians. We have enough enemies. I’m not going to provide any of them with recruits. Those we don’t keep, die. If we have to, we’ll just lock them in one of the cell houses, and close the door behind us. It’s not that hard. Now, give me your status reports. You first, Danny.”

    Bostic ran through the numbers. “We’re looking at maybe a six weeks’ food supply. As far as fuel goes, if we just use the fuel for cooking, we could go a little over three months. But, in the meantime, if winter come, things are going to get chilly. Could be very chilly, we just don’t know. We’re going to have to use wood for heating, and that’ll mean figuring out ways to make wood-burning stoves. We’ll also need some pretty big wood-gathering crews.”

    “Those estimates were based on what? Two thousand men?”

    “A little more, actually. My estimate was just about the same as what Jimmy came up with in his head count. But I figured twenty-four hundred men, just to be on the safe side.”

    Adrian gave him a thin smile. “Always good to be on the safe side. Which I just made safer, didn’t I?” He pointed at the pad in Bostic’s hand. “So now recalculate everything, starting with seventeen hundred men instead of twenty-four hundred. I just increased our margin by almost fifty percent.”

    Haggerty cleared his throat. “We’re gonna have to figure out what to do with the bodies, Adrian. We can’t just leave ‘em lying around. Things stink bad enough already, just from the couple of dozen men we’ve got waiting to be buried. By the time Jimmy’s finished, we’ll have twenty times that many.”

    Bostic scowled. “And most of the chamber pots aren’t being emptied any more. Stupid fucks. That’s their idea of liberty.”

    “So use the backhoe. It works, doesn’t it?”

    “That’ll take fuel,” Bostic said. “And even using a backhoe, five hundred bodies is a hell of lot to bury. You make the grave too shallow, that’ll be a problem after a while.”

    Luff was getting impatient. “Fine. Burn ‘em. We can use wood for that.” He waved his hand at the window. “There’s wood out there. Lots of it.”

    “That’ll work,” said Haggerty. “Kill two birds with one stone, too. Put the marginal ones on wood-cutting detail. If they squawk, shoot ‘em. I think we could get some of those big ass trees down and chopped up in a just a few days. That would give us what we needed to burn the bodies without eating into our fuel or food supply. The men could be worked without feeding ‘em much, too. If we called it a test, a tryout, promising that the best workers would be fed better, they’d work their asses off.”

    Luff nodded. Haggerty was sharp. He understood the logic of the situation right off, where Bostic was still dragging his ass.

    He considered Haggerty’s proposal, liking it the more he thought about it. Timbering was hard work, everybody knew that. Adrian had read once that a man doing hard labor needed at least four thousand calories a day. If they fed them starvation rations, they’d drop like flies, all except the best.

    “Push the motherfuckers hard,” he said. “Whichever die from hunger and overwork, that’s all the better. Seventeen hundred is still way too many.”

    He sat up straight in the chair. “Phil, you make up the list. Put anyone questionable on it. Anyone you think might be trouble. Double-check with Jimmy. Anyone that Jimmy decided to let pass but it was a close call, put him on the wood-cutting detail. However many we have tools for, we’ll put ‘em to work. If they can get two or three trees down before dropping dead, that’ll help. And if you get a half dozen guys who are actually good at bringing them down, fine. We’ll keep those and feed them better. We don’t know anything about this place. Winter could get long and cold.”

    Bostic was staring out the window. “Who burns the bodies? We can’t use our own guys, Adrian. We’re going to need them—all of them, each and every one, with a gun in his hands—to keep control over the situation. Once the guys figure out you’re planning to get rid of one out of four of them—”

    “One out of two,” Luff interrupted forcefully. “By the time I’m done.”

    Bostic made a face. “That just reinforces my point.”

    “He’s right, Adrian,” said Haggerty. “We gotta keep our own guys with their hands free of anything except a weapon. We only got maybe two hundred we can really count on.”

    Walker had figured three hundred reliables, but Luff thought Phil’s estimate was probably closer to the truth. Some of “our guys” wouldn’t cut it, when push came to shove.

    He thought about the problem. When the solution came to him, he smiled.

    “Use Boomer’s rugheads. You handle it, Danny. Put them in charge of the whole thing. Designing and building the pyres, furnaces, whatever works. Running them. Dumping the ashes. The whole nine yards.”

    Bostic looked dubious. So did Haggerty.

    “The Boomer’s crazy,” Haggerty protested. “He might go ballistic at the idea.”

    “I didn’t say Boomer himself.” Luff’s grin widened. “Tell him we want Cook in charge. Boomer can stay in his cell, keeping his hands clean. I want that fucking Indian running the show. Let the son-of-a-bitch spend some time handling corpses. I figure he’ll be a lot more cooperative in a week or two when I offer him a job running our new medical department.”

    He leaned back, shrugging. “Boomer’ll go for it. He’s not actually crazy. A lot of that’s just a reputation he built up, and did it on purpose. He knows he and his guys are on thin ice. As long as we don’t shove his own face in it, he’ll accept the situation. Cook’s new, anyway. It’s not like he and Boomer are old buddies.”

    Bostic looked back at his pad. “What about hunting parties? By the looks of the freezer, that’s what the guards were doing. They butchered something.”

    Luff shook his head. “Which of these motherfuckers would you be willing to give guns and ammo to, and a pretty please, come back and share with us?”

    Bostic shrugged. “Want to or not, sooner or later, that’s exactly what we’re going to have to do. We’ll have to use our own guys, of course.”

    “I know. But not now. Right now we need every man we’ve got and every damn bit of ammunition to keep the lid on. And don’t forget that Blacklock and his guards will be back, sooner or later.”

    Bostic scooted his chair closer to the desk and dropped his voice. “That’s what I’m worried about, Adrian. If I were in Blacklock’s shoes, I wouldn’t attack us. This place is a fortress. I’d just put a few shooters in the trees and keep us hemmed in. Eventually we’d get starved out.”

    Luff nodded. He had thought the same thing. He just hadn’t come up with a solution yet. He’d looked at the problem from every angle he could look at it from and, so far, had come up empty. Saving the dead in the freezers, just in case, wouldn’t work. Cannibalism only sounded acceptable the day before you died of hunger, and by then it would be too late. Besides, the electricity was gone. Unless they could get the generator back up, the freezers would be warm a long time before the last of the meat was gone.

    Leaving the prison, moving away from the area, getting out of reach of Blacklock and his guards might have worked, but he didn’t know who else was out there. If there were Indians and Spanish conquistadores, like Collins said, there could be too many of them. Or there could be other people altogether; modern people—hell, maybe even people from the future—who were well enough armed to take them out. Besides, there were dinosaurs roaming around loose out there. Real no-fooling dinosaurs. Adrian had seen one of them himself. It had walked past the prison just a few hours ago. As big as a shopping mall.

    No. They had to have the walls. Whatever else, they had to stay behind the walls.

    “What about hanging onto the disposable prisoners?” Bostic suggested. “Use them as cannon fodder. Force Blacklock into wasting his ammo on them. He can’t have too much with him.”

    “Don’t you understand? We can’t feed them in the meantime, period. We don’t know how long the guards will be gone.” Luff was getting tired of Bostic. The man was smart and capable, yes, but he could be a pain in the ass.

    “I heard once,” Bostic said, “a man could go a month or so without eating. If we give them water, keep them locked up, they should still be alive.”

    Luff slammed his left hand on the top of the desk. “What! Do you have shit for brains? They wouldn’t go after the guards. Every swinging dick in the joint would turn on us the second we opened the gates. No, we have to get rid of them.”

    Bostic shrugged. “Okay, then give me a few of our guys. Half a dozen or less. We can spare that many. I’ll take them out into the woods before Blacklock can get back here. We can bring in enough meat to give us an edge. Dammit, Adrian, we need someone outside the walls.”

    Luff thought about it. He was skeptical about how much meat Bostic and a small crew of hunters could produce. Sure, Danny could find deer hunters among the cons—but how many of them had been hunting in years? And shooting a deer was a whole different ball game from shooting a dinosaur.

    But it was true that they could spare that many men from watching over the others, once things stabilized a little. And Bostic and his guys could probably turn up something. The man was sharp and hard. In fact, he was probably the smartest and most capable of the three top lieutenants. He was sure as hell smarter than Haggerty. That was the reason Adrian had picked him, despite his misgivings.

    So, fine. Send him on his way playing Dinosaur Danny. Eventually, Adrian figured he’d probably have to get rid of Bostic. If that’s what it came down to, he could use the time Bostic was gone to make the arrangements to do so.

    But there was no reason to do it now. The man was useful for the moment, and you worked with what you had.

    “Okay, fine. Put together a crew. Four or five guys including you, no more. You can leave in about a week, I figure. By then, things should have settled down enough.”

    After Haggerty and Bostic left, Luff looked at the unmoving clock again, his mouth a hard straight line. Their prison was still their prison.

    He got up and went to the window. Things were moving too fast. He didn’t know what to do. Hitler killed and disposed of something like six million Jews. You’d think a thousand or so dead cons shouldn’t be that hard to arrange.

    But it was trickier than it looked.

    He couldn’t leave them in their cells to starve and rot. That would draw vermin, and pretty soon they’d have an epidemic—with no medical people except one uncooperative redskin EMT.

    He couldn’t shoot them. They had to conserve as much ammunition as possible. There was no way to replace it, and they still had Blacklock to deal with. Not to mention wild Indians and what sounded like wilder Spaniards and fucking dinosaurs and God knew what else.

    He couldn’t just turn them out. Some of them—probably most of them—would die, sure, but some wouldn’t. When Blacklock showed up, they’d slobber over him like dogs. That would give Blacklock an edge. Dealing with Blacklock was going to be a bitch, as it was.

    And he couldn’t feed them. Not two thousand, two hundred and forty-six men. He figured he couldn’t feed more than a thousand or so. Actually, right now, he couldn’t even feed that many. But with only a thousand mouths and stomachs, he thought he’d be able to stretch out the food supply long enough to come up with alternative food sources.

    It was the only chance he had. This was really just a simple mathematical problem, when you got down to it. And he’d been a damn good accountant.

    Still was.

    Danny Bostic left the office and headed for the compound.

    Luff was crazy. He was screwing up, and Danny wasn’t going to sit on his ass and die just because the man was an idiot.

    The prison was a trap, for God’s sake, not a haven. Yeah, there were people out there. But they were people armed with rocks and spears. And, yes, their ammo wouldn’t last long. But it didn’t have to. All it had to do was get them on top of the heap. Then, they’d be home free. They could set themselves up as chiefs, with warriors they’d recruited from the natives to keep them on top. The same way any good gang got organized.

    Danny knew some history. Not much, but enough.

    Medieval times, medieval ways. Nobody started off as Duke Whoozit. They started off—their ancestors, anyhow—as the toughest and smartest barbarian gang leader around.

    Walking fast, he went down the corridor in the administration building that led to the yard. Bostic knew Luff. If the man was already planning to kill five hundred people, just like that, it wouldn’t take him long to decide that was the way for lots more to go. Including, sooner or later, Danny himself.

    Luff was a sicko. The fact that he didn’t seemed to be, didn’t have any of the obvious habits of a sicko, didn’t mean squat. Underneath, the bastard was the scariest crazy in the whole joint.

    Where would it end? Danny could already see the logic. As long as Luff was fixated on staying in the prison because he thought it was a safe haven, there’d never be enough food. How could there be? A prison was a fucking prison, for Christ’s sake. What’d he think it was? A farm?

    Cannibalism, that’s where it would end. Sooner or later, in that crazy quiet way he had, Luff would decide it just made sense for the men he wanted to stay alive to eat the ones he didn’t.

    Danny Bostic had been a criminal since he was eleven years old. Earlier, really, if you counted petty theft and misdemeanors. He made no bones about it. As far as he was concerned, so-called “honest citizens” were just damn fools. Work their asses off their whole lives so the millionaires and billionaires they worked for could buy some more yachts, and then retire on Social Security and a measly pension—assuming the pension hadn’t been shredded. Spend their last dollars paying the bill at a nursing home that smelled like piss.

    Fuck that. If Danny hadn’t been born into a great wolf pack family, he could at least make a decent weasel.

    But this was just nuts. Plain and simple nuts. Even if Luff could keep control over the situation, he didn’t seem to realize he was just the captain of a ship going down fast.

    Danny slowed his pace, as he neared the exit, trying to keep his expression neutral. That was the reason he’d pushed, at the end, for his own hunting party. He didn’t want a large band. A few men would be plenty, as long as they were well armed and well supplied. He knew the men he wanted, too. They could raid the armory, the kitchen and the infirmary before they left. Take everything they needed. Leave during the night.

    He paused at the entrance and looked down at the list of things Luff wanted him to do. He would do them. He had no choice. He had to do them and anything else the asshole told him to do. But a few days from now, he would be gone.

    First, he had to go see the Boom about the body-disposal business.

    That was another stupid move. Boomer might be crazy, but he was crazy like a fox. On that, at least, Luff had it right—but he hadn’t thought through the logic. The Boom had managed to keep his boys together for years. Word had it that his gang of misfits had even grown a lot lately. Every con not already hooked up and not full white—or who was even willing to claim he wasn’t—had attached to the man.

    That wasn’t surprising, of course. Not long after the uprising, things had gotten out of hand for a while. Every con or group of cons with a grudge to settle had settled it, or at least tried. The big gangs had steered clear of each other, but lots of loners had been taken down. That was the reason there were twenty-three bodies piled up in the yard.

    That had scared every loner in the place, and some of them had gone running to Boomer. Who—yeah, crazy, sure he was—had played that “Uncle Timmy” bullshit to the hilt.

    It was nuts. Couldn’t Luff see that Boomer and his boys needed to be kept isolated? The other gangs could be played off against each other, but Boomer’s was unpredictable. They should all be locked up tight, in lots of separate cells. You put them in charge of something—didn’t matter what it was—and you gave them the opportunity to start planning and working together.

    And then—icing on the cake—Luff wanted the new kid in charge. Jesus H. Christ. New or not, Cook was a fucking hardass, couldn’t Luff see that? With that Indian mask of a face he had, you never knew what he was thinking. Danny wouldn’t put the bastard in charge of emptying kitty litter boxes.

    Bostic left the administration building and headed toward D-house. One of the men he was planning to take with him was very good at making keys. A few of those passed out at the right time, and the rest would be history. The shit would come down and when it did, he would be long gone.