The Damned (6 page)

“What happened to you?”

“Well, it’s like this…”

Davey took another drink of beer and Lila uncrossed her legs and stretched them out before her. All eyes were on Scott as he began his tale behind the wheel of a car on a blazing hot afternoon, and ended it at the side door of the house they were all sitting in.

“So you see, I don’t know how I stayed alive, how I
could
have stayed alive. It doesn’t make any sense. None of it does.”

Lila, who had drawn her knees up in front of her, and was now hugging them to her bosom, said, “I think we should celebrate. Because you
are
alive, somehow you did survive, and maybe, just maybe that means somewhere behind all this miserable shit we’ve all been dragged through, fate is involved. After all, you made it through something no one could have. By all accounts you should be dead, but you aren’t. And you, Davey. You’re the first child I’ve seen since this whole thing started. Maybe there’re more scattered throughout the world, hiding and waiting for everything to get better. Maybe things
will
get better.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Davey said. And he did. He lifted his bottle in toast and brought it to his lips, tipped it up and guzzled down the mouthful of warm beer that remained. He stood up and walked to the window, tossed the empty bottle into the yard and turned. Lila, who had stood and was making her way across the room, knelt by a pile of liquor bottles and began rummaging through them. Moments later, having fished out a fifth of Jack Daniels, she stood up.

“Let’s have a drink together. To a new beginning.”

Scott stood up, and he and Davey joined Lila in the center of the room, Davey smiling like he couldn’t believe somebody was actually going to hand him a bottle of whiskey. Lila uncapped the bottle, smiled and said, “To a new beginning.” She put the bottle to her lips, tipped it up and drank from it; pulled the bottle away and passed it over to Scott, who echoed her toast and took a drink of his own. Then it was Davey’s turn. He took the bottle from Scott, wincing as he sniffed the narrow opening passing beneath his nose. He looked from Lila to Scott, then back at Lila, and for the first time since Scott had met him, the hollow look was gone from his deep-set blue eyes.

“To a new beginning,” he said. He put the bottle to his lips, tipped it up and took a drink and quickly held it out to Scott, hacking and coughing and beating his chest while his new-found friends howled with laughter.

Dub and his crew passed through a parking lot full of Harleys and pick-up trucks, old abandoned automobiles and brand spanking new SUV’s, all buried beneath a thin sheen of dusty, grey ash. They pulled up in front of the jailhouse, a few yards down from a tanker truck loaded to the brim with gasoline. A group of men carrying the same kind of spiked bats Bert and Ernie had left back at the pit watched over the tractor-trailer rig, one with a bat and one with a hand-held communications device linking them to a team of armed bikers. The men, with their gaunt features and deep-set hollow eyes, were not gang members, but grunt-labor forced into servitude by The Devil’s Own, worker bees charged with keeping the hive operational, some of whose very own wives and daughters had been taken from them and now toiled within and without the complex. Months ago this foreboding structure had housed the dregs of society, criminals led to their new accommodations in leg-irons and chains. Now the shackles were gone and the inmates walked freely about the asylum, spreading a healthy dose of misery everywhere they went.

The tanker truck, part of a fleet commandeered soon after the thunder rolled and the fire fell from the sky, provided the precious resource that fueled four industrial-sized generators sitting in pairs at the back of the jail; plenty enough to supply the first floor with ample amounts of energy to keep the lights burning and the coffee percolating, the water running and the refrigerators filled with ice-cold beer. Here was the headquarters of The Devil’s Own, where injustice was handed down to any poor bastard unlucky enough to have been dragged kicking and screaming up the concrete stairs. Here was the property room where a steady supply of drugs was disbursed, and the Armory, which kept Dub and his band of brutes armed to the teeth with all manner of weaponry: shotguns and assault rifles, and an assortment of handguns: Glocks and Berettas, Colts and Sig Sauers, all topped off by enough ammunition to sink
The Bismarck
. Many an evening Dub and the boys had spent passing a sniper rifle back and forth, guzzling Jack Daniels and picking off the night crawlers and alley dwellers—five points for a head shot, two for a body; an extra point if the second body-shot dropped them, forfeiture of the weapon if it didn’t.

Dub always collected his five points.

He always won the game.

Dub stepped off his bike, smiling at a group of men coming down the stairs toward him. Three men, led by Rock Steady Teddy, who had missed his date with the cot-and-needle courtesy of the awe-inspiring phenomenon which had busted down prison doors all across the nation. All around the world, Dub figured.

Teddy’s sleeveless denim jacket hung loose on his wiry frame. Taller than Dub, his light blue eyes matched the faded material of his wildly embroidered threads, his thick beard a shade darker than the straight blonde hair hanging across his shoulders. An attacking scorpion rose up on one side of his jacket, a coiled rattlesnake on the other, both creatures rounded out by The Devil’s Own grinning skull and crossbones emblazoned on his back. One baleful eye winked from within the skull’s leering face, while beneath the crossbones, blood-red letters spelled out
The Devil’s Own
. Three tattooed teardrops spaced evenly down from the corner of his left eye denoted the three lives he’d snuffed out in the can. Two he’d gotten away with. The third of which had earned him his place on death row.

“Steady Teddy!” Dub called out, high-fiving his partner in crime as Bert and Ernie and Teddy’s two pals headed up the jailhouse steps. “’Sup, brother-man?”

“It’s all about you, baby.”

Dub didn’t acknowledge Teddy’s words. He let his grin do it for him, because it
was
all about him, and everybody around there knew it.

Teddy, nodding toward the spiked head, said, “Who’s your date?”

“Aw, just a little something I picked up.”

“Where’s the rest of her?” Teddy asked, drawing a snickering laugh from Dub, and a disgusted look from two of the truck-guarding-drones. “And where’s the rest of your crew? Eight rode out, four came back?”

“Had a little trouble there, Teddy. A little fucking trouble.”

“We
are
trouble, bro. The hell happened?”

Dub glanced up at a group of bikers who had just exited the front of the jailhouse, turned back to Teddy, and said, “We caught some carnival-ass midget coming out of a pawn shop. Started getting medieval on his hide and he gave up his old lady. Said she was his old lady, don’t think she was, though—just… old.”

Teddy snorted out a laugh, and Dub said, “Wasn’t
too
old, though.” Dub smiled. “If you get my drift.”

“Not too old to pass the cootchie around, huh?”

“Well, you know how it goes.”

“Looks a little rough around the edges now, brother.”

“Yeah, they always look a little rough by the time we’re done with ‘em.”

“No shit.”

“Anyway,” Dub said. “We take off and leave Crazy Joe and his pals working on the midget’s squeeze, go looking to see what else we can get ourselves into, but, well, you know how it is. People hear the hogs churning up the road, they scatter like cockroaches. ‘Bout the time we’re coming back down the drag, all hell breaks loose, shotgun blasts exploding all over the place—and I know they ain’t carrying no shotguns. So we pull up a couple of streets to the west, run over on foot and there they are blown to Kingdom Come. All four of ‘em, Crazy Joe’s head blasted clean away, the rest of ‘em a bloody, chunkified mess.”

“What’dya think, the Puerto Ricans?”

“Them, some John Q’s, maybe. Who the hell knows? Whoever it was sure as shit took ‘em apart. We looked around but they were gone, probably hiding up one of those dark alleys, hoping we’d venture their way so they could cut us down too. It’s dog eat dog out there, man. Sometimes the puppies bite back.”

“Not these puppies, brother,” Teddy said, nodding at the two drones, who had turned their backs to them and now stood watching the empty street.

Dub stared out at the tanker truck. With a fleet of them tucked away at a secret location known only to him and Teddy and a handful of their most trusted associates, (not Bert and Ernie—they’d tell the first skank to give them a blowjob) they had fuel enough to last for years, surely enough to keep them going until they figured a way to get the power plants up and running. But that was a ways down the road. First they needed to turn the gang into an army, use the army to quell any resistance that might rise up. Spread out and turn this patch of the country into a police state, a dictatorship governed by Dub, ruler of the land, King of The Devil’s Own.

Finally, he said, “Fuck ‘em. C’mon, Teddy. Let’s get us a beer and talk some business.”

Dub and Teddy left the drones to their misery. Pausing just long enough to exchange pleasantries with the armed bikers at the jailhouse entrance, they headed through the glass doors, down the hallway and into a lobby, where all the office furniture had been removed, the desks and chairs, fax and copy machines, all swapped out with an array of plush La-Z-Boy chairs and fine leather couches, arranged in a semi-circle in the middle of the great room. Behind the furniture were banquet tables piled high with every canned food item imaginable, from roast beef to ham, to canned Spam to caviar. Paper plates, plastic cups and cutlery and rolls of paper towels were scattered across the tables as well. A wall-sized plasma television screen book-ended by six-foot stacks of speaker cabinets adorned the western end of the room, fed by an HD DVD player that had been run through a high-powered, state of the art sound system. All items summarily ripped straight from the Best Buy showroom the day the generators were hooked up and power returned to the jailhouse. Four refrigerators stood along the back wall of the room, sandwiched between rows of cases of beer and wine that were intermingled with various cartons of canned foods and soft drinks, stacked nearly as high as the refrigerators.

Bert and Ernie and their two compatriots stood by one of the tables, Bert thumbing through a
Hustler
magazine while Ernie looked over his shoulder. Several bikers lay around the couches, some with women and some without. On the massive television screen, the actor Russell Crowe stalked the Roman Coliseum in his gladiator garb.

Dub and Teddy grabbed a couple of Coors from one of the fridges and continued through the lobby, down a hallway to what had once been a booking room. As a teenager, Dub had spent enough time in this facility to actually come to have known some of the officers by name: Shaunessy, with his huge gut and bald pate, and a drunkard’s bulbous nose; Minerva Wray, the corrections officer with tits out to there; Smitty, the gap-toothed photographer who had snapped Dub’s picture more times than he could remember. He wondered where they were now. Probably hanging upside-down from a metal beam, or bubbling in some lunatic’s soup pot. Either that or hiding out in suburbia, hoping like hell The Devil’s Own didn’t come calling, or someone worse, if there was someone worse.

All the desks and tables and chairs in this room had been left untouched. Teddy sat down in an office chair, leaning back and drinking from his beer as Dub leaned against a long, waist-high table. Dub knew this piece of furniture well. Many times his fingers had been inked and rolled against eight-by-eight-inch squares of paper, like the ones that now lay scattered along the rectangular wooden surface.

Dub drew a vial of cocaine from his pocket, uncapped it and tapped some of its contents onto the back of his hand. After snorting the powder, he capped the vial and tossed it to Teddy, who performed the same operation, smiling as Dub took a long drink of beer, sat his bottle on the table and said, “Fire us up a joint, brother.”

Teddy pulled a Bic lighter and a rolled-up plastic bag of marijuana from his front pants pocket, opened the baggy and fished out one of three pre-rolled joints. Fire crackled the cigarette paper when he lit up and sucked some smoke into his lungs.

Dub said, “We’ve got us a nice piece of real estate here—here and the clubhouse. We need more, Teddy. But to get more, we need more men. We need to do some long term planning, lay out some goals. Seven weeks into this shit, the smoke’s still in the air. When that shit clears out, we need to be in charge. Firmly in charge. Of this whole area, not just our little corner of town.”

Teddy took another hit, blew out some smoke and passed the joint to Dub. “Look, I hear what you’re saying, but, sooner or later things are gonna come back online, the army or the National Guard is gonna roll through here and shut our ass down.”

“We act now, we could have our own army by then. Kick their asses and send ‘em hightailing it back to where they came from.”

“The
United States
Army.
We’re gonna kick the shit outa the United States Army.”

Dub let out a stream of smoke, took a drink of beer, hit the joint again and looked at his friend. “Teddy, where’re all the cops? Why haven’t
they
shut us down?”

Teddy, shrugging his shoulders, accepted the joint Dub held out to him.

“They’re gone, just like the army’s gone. Sure, there might be some rag-tag, bullshit groups out there, but they’re not organized.”

“How do
you
know what’s out there?”

“Think about it, bro. The same thing that happened here’s happened all over the world. All those people who vanished—you don’t think a shit-load of ‘em were in the army, the National Guard, the government? Just like the cops, man; shit hit the fan and half of ‘em vanished, the rest of ‘em scattered the fuck outa Dodge, except the sorry bunch that stayed with us.” Dub took another toke, handed the joint to Teddy, and said, “What do you think happened, bro? How do you think you got outa that cell?”

“I don’t know.”

“You ever read the Bible?”

“
Fuck
no. Not since I was a kid, anyways.”

“You’ve heard of The Rapture though, right? That someday the righteous would be called up to Heaven? Or some kinda shit like that. Hell, I ain’t read much of the good book myself. But I do recognize what’s going on. What the hell else could it be? I saw Bernie-the-accountant blink out like some kinda crazy science fiction flick—right in front of my eyes. Just like—” Dub snapped his fingers. “—that, he was gone. One second he was here, then he wasn’t. Just like—”

“That. Yeah, you told me before.”

“I know I told you before. I’m telling you now ‘cause I want you to understand: we’re at the ground floor of this shit. If we act now, act boldly, we’ll come out on top. We’ll rule this area—hell, there’s no telling how far we can go if we come out of this with enough people behind us.”

“Dub… Bro. We’ve got like a hundred and fifty dudes, and half of
them
are stragglers we’ve picked up. Hell, most of our hard core brothers are morons like the four who got themselves killed this afternoon. And you want to take on an army? What’dya think, we can just throw some kinda conscription on the Q’s? Give those fuckers some artillery and force ‘em to man up against an organized militia?
You
gonna lead ‘em into battle? ‘Cause I sure as hell ain’t.”

“
We
will, bro. You and me.”

“You’ve been smokin’ too much of that shit, you think I’m gonna—”

“Teddy, how far we go back, man?”

“A long damn way.”

“Have I ever steered you wrong?”

Teddy wanted to say, ‘What’re you, kidding me? You steered my ass straight onto death row’. But he didn’t say anything. He just took another drink of beer and stared off into the distance, at the open window on the far side of the room.