Radio Hope (Toxic World Book 1) (27 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Annette Cruz lay in her bed reading. Her ten-year-old son Pablo lay snuggled up beside her. The barroom buzz of $87,953 could be heard faintly through the sound of her closed door.

She ignored it. Instead she buried herself in one of her favorite books from the Old Times
.
Evening in Sprin
g
, one of what she called “soft novels.” These stories weren’t about war or adventures or romance. Instead they were usually set in small towns where nothing much happened and people lived out lives of minor dramas and quiet struggles. The hero o
f
Evening in Sprin
g
, for example, was a young boy about Pablo’s age whose only problem was that he was sensitive and artistic and while he was well-loved by everyone in town, nobody understood that part of him.

Imagine that being your only problem in life! Did a world like that ever exist, even in the Old Times?

Who cares
,
Annette thought
.
It exists here in this book.

And what a lovely book with its quiet descriptions of a peaceful town and its lush, clean countryside all around where farmers grew bumper crops of healthy food and everyone could go down to the river to swim and if they wanted to take a drink all they had to do was open their mouths, confident the water would do them no harm.

She must have read that book a dozen times and every time it relaxed her
.
Winesburg, Ohi
o
was almost as good, but the characters in that one had problems that could almost be called problems s
o
Evening in Sprin
g
was better.

“Show me the first page again,” Pablo said.

“It’s called a flyleaf.”

“Show me the flyleaf again.”

She marked her place with a banknote from the Old Times (otherwise good for starting a fire or cleaning yourself in the outhouse) and turned to the front of the book. Tidy handwriting in pencil filled the page. Her eyes skimmed over a couple of lines.

“After you dry
your baby, rest him on your bare stomach, warming him with your body heat. Cover yourself and your baby with a blanket that’s dry and porous enough to. . .”

“So he got all that from Radio Hope?” Pablo asked.

Annette nodded. “Yep. Wrote it down while I had you inside me. You should have seen me. I had a big belly!”

“Bigger than Roy’s?”

Annette laughed. Roy was her boss at the bar. “Yes, but filled with a baby instead of beer.”

Pablo giggled and looked back at the page, suddenly serious. “I wish I could remember Dad.”

Annette stroked his hair.

“He was a good man and he loved you very much.”

“Can you read me some more of the book?”

“How about you read to me?” she said, turning back to their place.

Pablo snuggled a bit closer so he could get a better view of the page and read, “The wind had gone down entirely now, and the night was fragrant beyond words with the freshness of rain, the rich aroma of earth riding the wind from over the newly ploughed fields on the prairie west of the village. We walked along, saying nothing, just breathing in the sweet air. . .”

There was a soft knock at the door. Pablo got up and opened it a crack.

“We’re done counting,” Roy’s voice came from the other room.

Pablo hurried back and gave his mother a hug.

“You’re going to win, I just know it!”

“I better or I’m in deep shit,” Annette said, getting up and putting the book on the side table.

“You swore!” Pablo laughed.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

She stepped out of the back room that was her and Pablo’s home and appeared behind the counter at $87,953, the biggest and most popular bar in the Burbs. Even citizens from New City came out from behind their walls to drink there.

The crowd filling the bar roared its
approval at her appearance. The place was packed for the first election in the history of the Burbs. She could see all the regulars as well as a fair number of scavengers and a few citizens. Assistant Mayor Marcus Callahan was there, as was Clyde Devon, the Head of the Watch. They’d both pushed for her to be sheriff of the Burbs but the man whose idea it originally was, The Doctor, was significant by his absence. The mayor of New City and the Burbs had stayed home.

She didn’t have to ask why.
The day after he named her sheriff she had resigned and called an election. She didn’t want to be his appointee; she wanted to be her own woman. The Doctor didn’t take kindly to defiance, especially of this kind. The Doctor had never been elected.

Roy, the owner of $87,953, raised his hands in the air, a big smile spreading across his dark brown face. His voice boomed out over the crowd. “Quiet everyone, quiet! The votes are tallied. Will the candidates line up in front of the bar, please?”

Annette came around the bar and stood next to Charley Shibell and Frank Edgerton. Frank was $87,953’s other bouncer, a bear of a man who worked alternate shifts from Annette. He was a good friend and had gone on the ballot to make sure she wasn’t running unchallenged. That would have looked bad. Charley was a scavenger who had settled in the Burbs after the Righteous Horde had ravaged the countryside. He’d put his name in at the last minute.

Another scavenger named Milos Artur, who had announced his candidacy by standing on the bar, dropping his pants and declaring he was from the planet Sedna and had arrived on a spaceship to bring order to the Burbs, wasn’t present. He’d been last seen talking to a large boulder outside of town. The wildlands brought forth all sorts.

Roy produced a piece of paper, put on his reading glasses, and read aloud from a tally sheet.

“The official count for the election of sheriff of the Burbs is in. I and three other observers, Ahmed Abd-al-Karim of the Burb Council, Assistant Mayor Marcus Callahan, and scavenger Yoon Iseul have checked and rechecked the figures. From order of least votes to greatest, the results are. . .”

A snare drum tapped out a rapid tattoo. Annette looked around and saw the drummer was one of the regulars, a red-nosed man who owned a chicken farm a couple of miles away. Annette rolled her eyes. This was Roy’s doing. He had a cheesy sense of the dramatic.

“. . .
Milos Artur, zero votes.”

Snickers from the crowd. The guy had forgotten to vote for himself.

Another drum roll.

“Charley Shibell, 2
87 votes.”

Shibell grimaced in disappointment. Another drum roll.

“Frank Edgerton, 598 votes.”

Annette looked at him with surprise. She thought Frank’s candidacy was just a formality. Apparently he had people behind him.

“And the winner with the most votes, the candidate who will be our first sheriff of the Burbs is. . .”

Another drum roll.

Oh get on with it
!
Annette thought.

“Annette Cruz with 2,0
70 votes!”

The crowd cheered. Pablo jumped up and down beside her. She gave him a hug, and then shook Frank and Charley’s hands.

“Speech! Speech!” the crowd called.

“All right, all right,” Annette said. “First off, thanks for electing me.”

“Thanks for calling an election,” someone in the crowd called out. “Even though I voted for you I didn’t want you shoved down our throats like those snobs in New City tried to do.”

“None of that,
please,” Annette said. “This marks a new chapter in the relations between the Burbs and New City. When the Righteous Horde attacked it changed everything. We all had to fight together to survive. . .”

“Except for the Merchants Association, the selfish bastards!” someone else interrupted. An angry growl of agreement rumbled through the crowd.

“Enough already!” Annette said. Yeah, they were right, but couldn’t they see she was walking a tightrope here? “There were plenty of mistakes made, but we have to move on. There’s a Burb Council now, and precedent for sheltering within the walls when there’s an attack. And now there’s a sheriff. For too long the Burbs have been a place where decent people can’t walk alone at night. Too many shootings, too many knife fights, too many rapes. That’s going to change.”

The crowd applauded.

“We’re going to be a city worthy of the name,” she went on. “So as my first act as sheriff, I’m calling on the Burb Council to raise money for a jailhouse. Mostly we’ve just banished or lynched the bad offenders and let the minor offenders go. No more. Even minor offenses will carry penalties. It used to be that if you stole an apple from the market you had to give two apples back. Now you’re going to have to do that and spend a day behind bars at your own expense. I’ll be writing up a list of offenses and punishments and posting it all around town.”

She paused. Glancing at Ahmed and the other members of the Burb Council, she saw approval and worry in equal measure. She had just asked them to make their first municipal expense. They’d formed barel
y two weeks ago and had no funds and no means to raise them. Well, they’d just have to get more organized too. She took a deep breath and made her second announcement, one she knew would further the rift between her and the citizens of New City.

“As sheriff I’ve been granted to power to name two deputies. I name Frank Edgerton. . .”

There were murmurs of approval from the crowd. Annette tensed and continued.

“And for my second deputy I name Jackson Andrews.”

Silence.

She looked over at Marcus and Clyde. The look on the two citizens’ faces wasn’t pretty. Many of the Burbs people didn’t look too happy about her choice either.

“Jackson?” someone asked. “You mean the Blamer?”

Annette looked in the direction of the voice but couldn’t find the speaker.

“Yeah,” she said, the word sounding limp.

“He’s a convicted criminal!”

“Who’s had his punishment. Under New City law, by the way, not Burb law.”

“What, so you’re going to make Blaming legal now?” Marcus said. There was a threat in his tone that cut Annette deep. Marcus was a good man who had done her more than a few favors. Pablo called him “Uncle Marcus.”

“No, but I want someone I can trust, and I can trust him. We went into the wildlands together, fought the cult together, and do I have to remind you of what he brought back for The Doctor?”

That brought curious looks from the crowd. Clyde and Marcus didn’t reply. The medica
l pack Radio Hope had given Jackson had saved The Doctor’s life. That wasn’t general knowledge, though. The leaders of New City liked to pretend The Doctor wasn’t sick.

Annette addressed the crowd. “I have two other reasons for naming him. First, he’s on the Burb Council, which guarantees he’ll be looking out for Burb rights. Also he doesn’t buy into all this bullshit of one group being better than another. Citizens dump on associates who dump on scavengers who dump on the villagers in Toxic Bay.”

A mocking voice came from the crowd.

“Yeah, he liked them so much he even brought one into town. She stinks up the market every morning. Smells like an oil spill!”

Jackson’s voice cracked through the air like a pistol shot.

“Excuse me? Someone say something about my fiancée?”

Jackson Andrews stalked to the center of the now-silent room. A lean man in his mid-twenties wearing a tattered gray overcoat that showed he had just come in from the winter chill, his face was red with anger. The brand of a “B” stood out in livid white on his cheek, testament to his crime of placing Blame for the fall of civilization.

“Whoever said that, how about he steps forward?” he said.

Annette tensed
.
Great, his first act as deputy is to pick a fight.

The room stayed silent. Jackson nodded.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Now if Annette’s done,” Jackson turned to Annette, who shrugged, “I have something of my own to say. You were all happy with this election because it showed we were independent from New City. Well, me being deputy ensures that. We’re not going to take orders from citizens.”

“Aren’t they paying you?” a woman asked.

“Good question. Now that I’m deputy, are you still going to pay us, Marcus?”

The assistant mayor frowned at Jackson. “We’ll see.”

“You do that. Now I think Sheriff Cruz has one more announcement.”

Annette sighed
.
Oh yeah, that.

She went behind the bar, took
a rifle case down from a shelf and laid it on the counter. Unzipping it, she pulled out a matte black sniper’s rifle.

“You’ve all heard about my gun. This is a
Dakota T-76 Longbow. It fires .338 Lapua Magnum rounds that can punch through military-grade body armor at 1,500 meters.”

Everyone looked at it with awe. It was the most advanced firearm in New City or the Burbs. She glanced at Clyde. The Head of the Watch was staring at it like most men stare at a naked woman.