Authors: Brian Hodge
“They wouldn’t know you.”
“So write them a letter, and I’ll give it to them. Draw me a map of how to get there. And we’ll see if anybody’s got an instant camera, get a picture of us together. It’ll work out.”
Jason fingered little shapes on the top of the picnic table. He owed a lot of people for a lot of good done to him. In St. Louis, across the Southern states, here in Heywood. But Tomahawk…he had to say he owed Tomahawk most of all. For giving him his life back, in more ways than one. To refuse his help now, so selflessly offered, would be an insult.
“Well,” Jason said, “I guess it would be good to have you around when I first see Erika. For moral support. She’s really gonna be pissed when she finds out I’ve got more scars.”
Tomahawk reached a hand across the table to Jason’s good shoulder. “Bear them proudly, Jay. You know what you went through to get them. You know what it took.”
He pointed to the one by his eye. “We don’t tell her that one’s from you.”
“Oh hell no,” said Tomahawk.
He pulled out a pen and a folded sheet of paper, and Jason began to write.
* *
The sentry on I-44 hated to admit it to himself, but the new duty he’d drawn had turned into the pinnacle of boredom. Ordinarily, Greely was a patient man. He could sit and wait and watch for hours, like a lizard on a sunny rock. Peter Solomon had chosen him for that very trait. But a week of watching for cars twelve hours a day could erode even a mountain of patience.
Greely looked out at the sky. The sun was straight overhead. He heard nothing from either direction along this stretch of interstate that sliced through the St. Louis suburbs, so he stepped down and out for a stroll. Here he’d been spending his days, in a stalled and cockeyed Mack semi-cab. Looking for a car from the southwest. They had the girl, and that seemed like enough, but Solomon wanted to cover every base. Thus the sentries posted in concealed lookouts on every likely route that Jason Hart might use if and when he returned.
Greely strolled over the hot pavement. He stood well over six feet, and had lost a lot of weight in the last year, but in all the right places. His skin looked cadaverously pale and he kept his hair buzzed close to his skull. His smile could frighten young children into fits of screaming.
He left in a red Mustang, so watch for that,
Solomon had told the lookouts.
But he could’ve switched cars. You never know. So look at the plates of anything that passes through. If he switched, they’ll probably be Southern.
After stretching his legs, Greely climbed back into the cab and toyed with his two tools for this assignment: a powerful pair of binoculars and a walkie-talkie.
Tedious. He’d never guessed that doing nothing would turn into such a challenge. But if Solomon had anything, he had uncanny instincts.
It would pay off in time.
3
It had been a couple of years since Tomahawk had been through Missouri, except he’d never been this low to its roads before. He was used to seeing places from behind the wheel up in a Peterbilt cab, not from a puny blue Chevy Cavalier. Sometimes you really had to sacrifice to do good in the world.
It had been almost as tough saying goodbye to Jason for several days as it had been getting used to the fact that he no longer rode with the King and the rest of the clan. He looked at the Polaroid taken just before he’d left Heywood: he and Jason, arms around one another like college buddies, all smiles, hair past their shoulders. Tomahawk kept the picture on the dash, corner tucked into the crack over the ashtray.
He recalled the last thing Jason had said before leaving in the Cavalier: “You touch Erika, and I’ll kick your ass. Again.”
Wouldn’t be long now before he got to see this wonder woman in the flesh. A half-hour, maybe.
Tomahawk was still grinning over Jason’s parting words when he steered past a cockeyed semi-cab, a reminder of better, more predictable days.
* *
The sentry on I-44 grabbed his walkie-talkie as soon as he’d set down his binoculars.
“Greely here,” he said into the transmitter. “Got a car heading your way, blue Chevy, I think. Texas plates. Interested?”
“Was it Hart?” Hagar’s voice crackled back. “Could you tell?”
“Couldn’t see that well. But it was only the driver, and it looked like someone with long hair.”
“Barricades up, then. We’ll check it out.”
* *
Three or four minutes after passing the truck cab, Tomahawk rounded a curve and saw another crippled dinosaur from the gasoline age. This time it was a mass transit bus, parked straight across the northeast-bound lanes. No way to steer around it either. A concrete divider separated him from the opposite lanes, and jumble of junker cars filled the shoulder at the right. Scratch this route. Now he’d have to wing it.
Tomahawk was slowing the Chevy and preparing to turn around near the bus when three men strolled toward his car from both front and back. All of them had guns at the ready, and were set up to put him in a major crossfire. One man lifted his hand in peace.
Slow and eeeeasy,
he told himself, gearing the car into park. He looked at the converging men.
No worries, they don’t know me.
“You wanna step out of the car?” one called, a redheaded troll of a man. “Routine checkpoint, that’s all.”
Slowly, deliberately, Tomahawk complied. He left his gun in the car; bringing it would be a sure way to escalate the situation. But maybe they wouldn’t notice the stone ax at his belt. The three of them sauntered closer, looking him over, as well as the car.
“Where you headed?” asked the troll.
“Upstate New York,” Tomahawk said. “Wanna find my old family, see if anybody’s left.”
“Indian, by the look of you?” asked the third, a harsh-voiced young man.
“Iroquois. Cayuga Nation.”
The troll nodded, musing it over. The others were circling like wary vultures. It was impossible to keep an eye on all three.
“Sanchez,” the troll finally said. “Check the car.”
A squat, muscular man with a heavy moustache and all the charm of a bulldozer shouldered past and bent inside the car.
Go ahead,
thought Tomahawk.
I got nothing in there to hide.
Except…
AW SHIT!
Sanchez, a moment later, came popping back out with the picture in his fingers, and then Tomahawk spun around, trying to get one arm around Sanchez’s neck and the other hand on the ax, his only hope now, and even that was slim at best, because they knew,
they knew,
he’d blown it all for stupid sentimental reasons, and —
And somebody walloped him a good one along the side of the head with something hard, and then Tomahawk knew nothing.
* *
“Hey. Wake up. Wake up and show me what you’re made of.”
The Indian hung limply before him, head limp and lolling as he gradually swam back to consciousness.
“Come on, come on, I haven’t got all day. Wake up.” Peter Solomon lightly slapped the man’s face as four others watched from the background, near the entrance to the automotive service garage bay where he’d met them. One of the Indian’s eyes opened and Solomon grinned. He rolled a road atlas from the blue Chevy into a tight shaft, poking one end under his chin and lifting his head up. “Come out come out, wherever you are…”
Tomahawk blinked and grimaced his darkly ruddy face. A thread of blood glistened in his glossy black hair. But neither blood nor hair were quite so shiny as his eyes had suddenly become, focusing and glaring with a hatred whose intensity even Solomon had to admire.
“What’s your name?” he asked, and the man told him.
Solomon moved back a step, watching as Tomahawk took stock of his situation…looking up at his arms, stretched overhead so that each hand cupped its opposite elbow, both forearms bound by heavy nylon rope to the crossbrace of a hydraulic lift used to hoist cars. Looking down at his feet, bound to the iron guide rails running along either side of the grease pit. Looking past Solomon to the other four, framed in the open doorway as dust swirled by outside. They slouched and toyed with their guns. Finally looking back at Solomon with contempt.
Solomon narrowed his eyes and stepped closer, ever so slowly pacing from one side of the Indian to the other, feeling those dark, hawkish eyes following him.
“Where did you leave him?” Solomon asked, voice rising over that of the hot wind outside.
Silence.
“You know who I’m talking about, don’t you? I can see it in your eyes you know exactly who I’m talking about.” He stared patiently at Tomahawk, hearing only the wind. He held up the picture, and, when he got no response, ripped it in half and fourths and eights, and the pieces fluttered down. “Hmmm…looks like your jaw needs a little loosening.”
Solomon clamped his hand under Tomahawk’s mouth. His thumb and middle finger worked their way into the crevices where jawbone met skull, and went rigid, and squeezed…and squeezed…and squeezed…until blood trickled from inside the cheeks, then outside. He continued the pressure, the Indian clenching his eyes shut, and finally Solomon felt and heard the cracking of molars, bending from their sockets.
Solomon already had what he wanted, after a search of their unconscious captive had turned up a letter from Jason Hart himself. In fact, Solomon had the next few days already planned out. He would send Lucas and Hagar and Greely and Sanchez to Heywood. At the same time, he’d make a trip with Earl Masters to Kansas City, to inspect the power plants there.
As far as information went, this man known as Tomahawk had already served his purpose. But there’d been no sport. No breaking of his will, no sense of shame when all the betraying facts spilled forth.
And this time he’d picked one tough nut to crack: an Iroquois, once upon a time among the most feared of Indians. Better to be killed early by them rather than captured, because they’d known some of the most ghastly methods of torture ever devised. Yet the Iroquois might nonetheless speak kindly to their suffering enemies, encouraging them to show bravery, to meet pain and death with courage and dignity. The age of the Indian wars was long gone, and certainly this specimen knew nothing of them firsthand, but still, his ancestors were in his heritage, his soul, his blood.
The eyes of an eagle, burning with hatred, refusing to be intimidated…
Come on, damn you, let me feel your fear.
Tomahawk worked his tongue inside his mouth, then craned his head forward and spat out the two molars, a pair of bloody dice that stained Solomon’s cream-colored shirt. Solomon’s eyes widened and his breath rushed in and out of flaring nostrils. He stalked over to a post standing between the service bays, and his fingers pressed a big green button. Without electricity, it had been only so much grimy decor.
Now it brought a grind of old machinery stirring to life, heavy and clanking. The lift began to rise, an inch, two, three. Writhing as the dull steel pillar behind him lifted higher, Tomahawk became elastic. Muscles bunched thickly underneath his clothing, as tendons popped and ligaments strained. Sweat poured down his knotted body as Solomon’s hand left the button. Tomahawk panted for breath, hair clinging wet to his cheeks and throat.
The men behind Solomon watched with an uneasy mix of fascination and revulsion, but he’d forgotten they even existed. He stepped over to Tomahawk again, patted one rock-hard shoulder.
“No need to let this go any further. Just tell me what I want. As simple as that.” At best, he would let the Indian hang there to die of asphyxiation or heat prostration or dehydration, whichever claimed him first, but his eyes glittered with the promise of release. “Simple. As. That.” He leaned tantalizingly forward.
Tomahawk pursed his lips and spewed a thin stream of blood and saliva. It dribbled down his chin as Solomon wiped furiously at his eyes and stumbled back to the button. Glaring, he pressed it, hearing the satisfying grind of hydraulics. Tomahawk bared his teeth in strain as his body pulled as tight as a bridge cable. His eyes went skyward, and his lips may have moved in prayer.
“Last chance, red man!” Solomon shouted, giving the button a quick peck that sent another shudder rippling through Tomahawk’s body. “Next time you go to the happy hunting ground in two pieces!”
With a bloody rictus grin, Tomahawk nodded.
“GIVE ME WHAT I WANT, YOU FUCKER!” Solomon shrieked.
The man knew as well as he did that he meant more than Jason’s location, and knowledge was power. With Tomahawk’s blood and spit streaking his face, Solomon glared across the garage and wondered how all this could’ve happened, things had gone so smoothly until now. And
now
this strung-up bastard without a hope in the universe was looking as if
he
were the one in charge.
“GIVE IT TO ME!”
The breaking point…
“I hope you
do
find him,” Tomahawk rasped. He dribbled more blood through clenched teeth. “It’s
your
ass then, little man.”
Solomon’s fingers stabbed for the lift button.
The clashing grind of machinery…
The first sharp crack of bone…
And this time he did not let up.
4
All talk and no action. For a week and a day, that’s the way it had gone. Ever since Colleen had come running in, out of breath and barely coherent, though they’d all managed to figure out that the Union Station Hospitality Committee had come and taken Erika away.
Diane McCaffrey had contented herself with watching from the sidelines, nurturing weary disgust at the daily discussions that accomplished little more than deciding that something had to be done. Hawks and doves, that seemed to be the way things were dividing up. There were those ready to give Erika up for dead or converted or brainwashed, so maybe they should all just quietly pack up and fade away to someplace else so something like this didn’t happen again. Diane almost applauded when Rich Patton actually rose and punched a guy who suggested letting them keep her, that it wasn’t worth the risk of trying to get her back.
And then there was the small faction who preached armed invasion.
That
was a peach of an idea, about as sensible as a game of Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun. Even so, she noticed these Rambos-in-the-making were talking a good game, but stopped short of volunteering to lead the mission.
“Yep,” she muttered to herself. “Badass bunch of survivalists
we
are.”
“Say again?” It was Caleb. The late afternoon sun was burning outside in the streets and she’d been daydreaming against the bank of windows. It wasn’t much more comfortable here inside. Her entire body felt coated with a sticky film.
“Nothing,” she said. But didn’t she really want to talk to him? She’d known it was Caleb behind her without turning around. Of course she wanted to talk to him. Because there weren’t a lot of people left in this place she
did
feel like talking to. The sentiment seemed to be contagious, more so as the days went on. “Erika, that’s all. Poor thing, she could rot in that place before anybody here would lift a finger to do something about it.”
Despite the tan that decades of farming had branded into him, he flushed. And found a sudden interest in staring off to the side.
“I didn’t mean
you,
Caleb.”
“You think you might’ve if I was younger?”
“You’ve got nothing to prove to me, Caleb. I still remember how we met.” Diane turned back to the window to stare out at the empty street again. “I’m sure if Jason was here, he wouldn’t be sitting around with his thumb up his ass. But…do you think he’s even still alive?” She shook her head sadly. “For that matter, we don’t even know if Erika’s still alive.”
Caleb moved a couple steps closer until they were side by side and staring out in tandem. “I got a hunch she is. There’s something a little unique about her than the rest of us, and I’ll betcha that’s why they nabbed her.”
“Unique?”
“Yeah. It’s kinda hard to explain. Don’t even know if she’d want me telling you.”
Diane nodded. “Okay. Keep your secrets.”
“So I’ll bet she’s still hanging in there.” Then his face ticked. “But for how much longer, I dunno. Hard not to worry after what they done to those folks in the stadium back in June. See a sight like that, you can’t ever
un
see it.”
“Glad I wasn’t there.”
Caleb nodded. “Missed the invite. Yeah, you got lucky on that one.”
“Smartest time I ever picked to grab Farrah and hit the stores. I’m glad she…” Diane fell suddenly silent, no longer seeing beyond the pane of glass.
I
wasn’t there…
Meaning…
And then she began to scheme.
* *
Mid-evening. In the waning sunlight, she looked at herself in the half-length mirror in her room. Front on, left side, right side. She grinned.
“Hey, hotness,” Diane told herself. “I remember you.”
She wore a green low-cut dress, short of hem and snug around the middle. Her blond hair was pulled loosely back and pinned at the back of her head, with a few stray wisps trailing down. She actually preferred the length it had gotten in the past year, after keeping it short for so long. It had returned to the way she’d worn it when she’d first married. It was like seeing an old photograph of herself. And if her breasts had lost a few degrees of perk since then, not to worry, because there were so many other compensations.
“You’re a thirty-seven-year-old knockout,” she pep-talked herself. “You’re at your molten sexual peak. You have it within you to be the object of every man’s desi—” She clamped her mouth shut and started laughing in spite of herself. Nerves, just nerves. The giggles passed. “Just make it back alive, okay?”
She kicked her feet into a pair of sandals, then double-checked the things stuffed into her purse. Everything in place, fine. Then she reached onto the bed and picked up the small item she’d taken from sporting goods an hour earlier. Into the purse it went, at the bottom.
“Now or never,” she and her reflection told each other.
She’d planned on heading out through the twisty maze of hallways and down a back stairway to the fourth floor to avoid attracting attention out on the main floor. It might’ve worked if she hadn’t run into Caleb moments after leaving her room. He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, an unlit cigarette popped into the corner of his mouth.
“Lord, you’re a sight,” he said. His eyes were hard to read, a cross between bemusement and concern.
“Just going out for a while.”
He nodded, transferring the cigarette to the other side of his mouth. “I know what you’re thinking. I saw it whirring in your brain this afternoon. You know how dangerous this is?”
Diane shrugged, her purse sliding against her hip. “Except for Farrah, I’m the only one they haven’t seen. They don’t know what I look like, Caleb. They don’t even know I exist.”
“Mmm hmm. And what about Ted and Wendy? They switched sides that night in the stadium. Those two didn’t strike me as being especially forgetful.”
“That’s a chance I’ll have to take. Hope I blend in with the rest of the crowd and they don’t notice me.” She reached out to cup his cheek and felt a light sting of tears, then blinked them back. No chinks in the armor, not tonight. “Don’t wait up, Dad.”
“Hope like hell you know what you’re doing,” Caleb said. He looked for all the world like a man sending his only daughter off to her first prom, from which she might never come back.
Diane nodded, but only for his sake.
No…I don’t …
* *
The place nearly choked the breath out of her, and it was more than just the heat from the fires.
After the seasons of use, the high school gym they used for their arena, their bloodsport, resembled the interior of a medieval dungeon. Dark and grimy, heavy with the aura of uncontained violence, its air smelled rank with old sweat and blood. It was frightening, a terrible place, and she instantly recognized its perverse appeal. The dark side called here, primitive and raw.
Anything goes here.
Diane very nearly turned around and walked back out.
Steady…go through with this.
She walked midway up the tiers of bleachers. Down on the floor, a towering bald man wearing a dog collar was squared off against a grubby pair of urchins—late teens, maybe. A black man with a bullhorn had made some comment about justice being served, seeing as how they’d raped Hagar’s woman while he was away, whatever the story behind that was.
First blood was drawn, and the crowd erupted with appreciation. Her stomach threatened to turn inside out. She’d heard they were doing this show twice a week now, Fridays as well as Tuesdays. Popular demand from a growing population.
With the green call-girl dress, she felt as if she’d draped herself in neon. Diane could sense the eyes on her as she walked the aisle, stares from the men and animosity from the women. “Premium poon,” she heard someone drawl from the bleachers, and her stomach finished its journey.
Jason had told her of this place months ago, after he’d wrestled with his own reactions to it. He’d told her what went on down on the floor. He’d told her of the crowd. And he’d told her about the first row at center court, where Travis and his companions viewed the spectacle. She’d never seen Travis, but even from behind, in the gloom, she recognized him from the descriptions given by the others.
She saw wavy dark hair, and heavy shoulders rising over the seatback. His arms were propped across the seats to either side of him, because he was apparently alone. Poor baby—friends wouldn’t come out to play tonight?
So much the better.
Diane took a deep breath and descended the center steps, stopping at the railing, almost leaning against it until she saw that it was wrapped with barbed wire. She peeked out the corner of her eye. Travis sat ten feet away, hunched over now and absorbed in what was going on below.
She looked to see what it was.
The bald man had one of his opponents by an arm and a leg, and was using him to bludgeon the other. Every time they clashed, their heads seemed to buckle a little more.
More eyes upon her—she felt it as surely as if she’d been touched. Travis. The moment of truth.
Make it good.
“You gonna stand the whole time?” he asked, staring directly at her.
Diane returned it, meeting him eye-to-eye. “Those looked like reserved seats.”
Travis gave her a crooked grin. “Reserved for whoever I damn well please.” He turned a palm out over the seat next to him.
She played coy for a moment, pretending to consider it, then slid in beside him. She could smell the pungent tang of his sweat, feel the slick skin of his triceps at her shoulder.
“I don’t recognize you,” he said, his forehead creasing. “Where the hell did you turn up from? Way out in West County?”
She let out a high laugh, part faked and the rest sheer nerves. “A little farther than that. I just left Hannibal.” It was the only place she could think of on the spur of the moment, and that was solely because of having read Mark Twain in college.
“What’s Hannibal like these days?”
“Dead,” she said, and Travis sniggered. “I came down looking for a little more life and followed another car here. Looks like I found it. I guess.”
He gave her another smirking grin, leaning in toward her, eyes aglow. She had him interested, and that was the first hurdle. Earlier in the evening she’d been stricken with horror at the thought that he might be gay. No such problem, not with that bulge in his lap.
Diane considered his looks. He wasn’t really blessed, but you couldn’t call him ugly, either. There was something there, hard to put your finger on. Some spark, an animal charisma. His build certainly helped, and whatever else you could say about this man, his body was one fine piece of work. She decided her reaction was similar to those some women had once had to Charles Bronson.
He gestured out toward center court, where the bald man stood over the pair of limp, bloody forms heaped on the floor, to the loud acclaim of the crowd. “And a woman like you…you
like
this?”
Diane cocked her head, pretending to contemplate it. “I wouldn’t buy the video, but it beats the shit out of basketball.”
“Not as many rules, and no penalties.” He laughed. “We got the electricity running again, but it seems better like this, the fires. Whole place was my idea.” He pointed a finger up into the mass of spectators in the stands. “For my people.”
“
Your
people?” she said, arching her eyebrows. “Everyone here?”
“Just call me the fucking emperor.”
“That goes for everybody in St. Louis?”
“St. Louis and wherever else we expend to.” A brief cloud darkened his smug reverie. “We got a few holdouts here and there, assholes who don’t feel like playing by the rules—”
Sir, you are talking to just such an asshole.
“—but we’ll work it out. Once some people of mine get back from a trip, we’ll lay down an ultimatum or two. See if that doesn’t bring ’em around.”
Diane narrowed one eye. “If I decide to stay in St. Louis,” she mused while drawing a fingertip across the sweat beaded over her breasts, then licking it, “does that mean I’m one of your people too?”
Travis sniggered again, throwing his head back, the muscles bunching in his neck. “Like I said, just call me the fucking emperor.”
And it was as simple as that. She stayed with him through the remainder of this barbaric spectacle. Next on the roster of talent were a couple of guys with ball bats settling a dispute over the ownership of a car. Diane marveled at its stupidity. An entire city full of car lots, and two guys were willing to fight over one. She ceased to pay attention to the black man’s introductions after that. She paid as little attention to the exhibition as she could get away with, and when it got too bloody for her, she focused on a spot on the railing and dreamed of better places.
It took the longest ninety minutes of her life to wind down, and once it had, she hoped she’d never set foot in such a place again.
“Tell me,” she said then, “does the emperor ever wear no clothes?”
They rode back to Union Station in Travis’s truck, alone but part of a long caravan. Everyone parked on a gigantic lot outside the back mall entrance, with the elevated lanes of highway in the background. Diane clung to Travis’s arm on the way in, eyes peeled for Ted and Wendy, but the odds were against it. Too dark, too many people, too much going on.
They cut left, ascending a stairway and crossing a walkway that took them into the Omni. Travis lived on the second floor in a section known as the garden hotel. He was on her as soon as the door was closed, as she’d known he would be. She felt the warm marble of his body against her, his hands running up and down her back, her sides. His mouth smothered her, then ran down her neck. He freed her hair, and it spilled past her shoulders. Travis pushed the dress straps to either side, then peeled the entire top down to her belly, and her breasts jiggled until his hands put a stop to that.
Subtleties were lost on this man. He was rough, and with the right man, rough could be fun. This was
not
the right man but she pretended he was, until she felt herself responding to his heavy touch, felt herself growing wet, her breath quickening into his mouth. Until she realized that he was assuming total control of the situation and she couldn’t have that.