Well Fed - 05 (49 page)

“What’s part two?” Gus asked, his mouth gone dry.

“Part two is integration. Comes after about six months or so. When all the fight’s been bled out. They’ll work around camp and such, getting to know folks, seeing that our way is best for all concerned. If they have or had kids, well, they’ll see them with our kids, see them getting along. After six months, they’ll be evaluated and maybe moved on to something a little more interesting. Maybe be allowed to carry a weapon.”

“You’ll give them a gun?” Gus asked in disbelief.

“Fuck no. Th’fuck you think I am? Stupid? Maybe a knife or a bat. No guns. But if all goes well and they can be trusted, sure. In time, why not? The more, ah, adventurous ones might even come along on the next roundup of fresh meat.”

Gus looked at the motley collection of dejected heads hanging between shoulders. Some hung lower than others, but a few appeared more than ready to…
what
?

Prove themselves
came to mind.

“You can’t do this,” Gus whispered, very much aware of the henchmen looming behind Shovel’s back.

“Already told you—if I don’t, someone else will. Someone who’ll use them against me. There’s no compromise in this day and age. Only you and the ones against you or who
will
be against you. There’s nothing else.”

“Jesus…”

Shovel pulled Gus out of the doorway and confronted him. Shovel’s brown, almost black eyes studied his brother’s scarred features, searching for truth.

“Gussy, listen now. You listening? Good. That’s good. I need to know you’re with me on this. That you’re on board here. Some of my guys don’t think you are. They don’t think your heart’s in this in the least. I tell them they’re wrong—dead cat wrong. It’s in the bloodline, I tell them. But, I gotta ask you now, and you gotta answer and look me in the eye when you do. Are you with me here?”

Gus stared back and involuntarily shivered, staring at Jerry in mute horror, seeing nothing of the big brother he remembered from his youth, nothing of the young man who’d left Annapolis for some Albertan oil field along with their brother Sidney, gone to greener pastures. A few memories shot through his mind of days long gone, but none of them stuck. Jerry wasn’t Jerry anymore. Jerry had crossed a line, a very personal line, probably not entirely different from the lines Gus had waltzed across, but where Gus had stopped on the precipice of a very frightening drop, Jerry kept right on going. Maybe he’d been forced to keep on going—Gus could understand that, remembering the faces of people he’d had to kill in order to live.

Maybe Jerry just accepted it faster—learned to live with it—or maybe he’d come to like it.

“What the fuck happened to you?” Gus whispered. “You’re like a… a
warlord
here. Those are
prisoners
you got sitting on their asses.”

Jerry––Shovel––shook his head. “You didn’t see them during their initiation. They aren’t prisoners. They’re
survivors
. They understand.”

“Then they’re all fucking idiots.” Gus firmed up his jaw. The tension ratcheted, and Gus could’ve sworn that the men behind him would’ve shot him dead except for the presence of Shovel, who showed no emotion at the insult. Not a trace.

“I’m looking at an idiot,” Shovel finally said in a voice that touched bedrock.

“It’s in the bloodline,” Gus countered.

Shovel’s face hardened. “Yeah.”

Shovel’s time for Gus ended then. His men manhandled Gus back into the trailer with barely a struggle. The one called Sick stuck a needle into Gus’s arm, and hot ecstasy gushed into that limb, quickly storming his brain. Gus lay back on the sofa, but it had become a cloud, a soft cushiony one, and the roof was the moon.

Fuck me
, Gus thought, mouth open. He understood why the shit was illegal.

But that trip turned bad.

The creamy ceiling overhead darkened with images of Shovel doing bad things. A black-and-white movie rolled across the heavens, depicting Shovel killing people without provocation, on the sole premise that if they weren’t with him, they weren’t with anyone. His henchmen stretched and sprouted into centipedes, swallowing the newly dead whole. Gus told them to stop, but they didn’t. He swung at them, but they laughed, red lining their picket-fence teeth.

In the end, a great black sleep sucked Gus down, mercifully dreamless, and when he opened his eyes, his first thought was…

Night.

Gus lay on the floor of the trailer, wedged between a plush chair and the sofa. He rubbed a cheek and absorbed the absence of light, sensing it as darker, more ominous than before. He sat up with a groan, his mouth feeling as if his last meal had been sawdust. For long minutes, Gus sat there, breathing, contemplating his situation. His strength returned, to a point, and his stomach tugged on his chain, alerting him that something needed to drop its way and soon.

When was the last time he’d eaten anything? Gus couldn’t remember and doubted they’d left anything in the trailer. He stood and fumbled through the furniture. Someone had left a sealed Tupperware dish of cured deer meat and a plastic bottle of water on the desk, and Gus made do with a very late dinner. When he finished, he sat at the desk’s edge and just breathed, wondering what he should do. Jerry didn’t appear to be listening to reason and, worse, seemed bent on doing things his way. Gus reluctantly concluded that his brother had changed for the worse.

So where did that leave him? Motorboating up shit’s creek, that’s where.

Gus stood, weathered a rush of wooziness, and studied the blackness of the trailer’s interior. He felt around the shadowy desk, stumbling at times, hunting for a lamp or a light switch, anything to help him see. Nothing covered the desk, however, and Gus huffed his impatience. The rear door beckoned, and he lumbered toward it, keeping one hand against a wall. The door had an escape bar, and Gus pushed on it, hearing a click.

The door did not open.

He tried twice more and put his shoulder into the barrier, grunting at the solid contact.

“Christ almighty.” Gus rubbed his shoulder. He looked back and swore at his drugged brain. There, at the other end of the trailer, was an opening in the ceiling allowing moonlight inside. He’d missed it completely.

“Still fuckin’ stoned here,” Gus muttered as he approached the opening, but his bearings were returning quickly. He stopped at the foot of Jerry’s bed and looked up, studying a cracked hatchway. Gus stepped onto the bed, noting the springiness in the mattress, and gazed up through a wire mesh. Arms stretched out for balance, Gus craned his neck one way and then the other, watching, listening, and thinking.

What to do, what to do?

“Fuck it,” he muttered, hot resentment shooting through his veins instead of that zombie shit or whatever the hell it was called. He certainly didn’t like being kept under house arrest. He reached up and discovered the screen could be slid away. It opened with a few testing shoves and a rattle at which Gus cringed, waiting for a reaction. When none came, he found his fingers touched the outer rim of the hatch.

I’m
so
not fucking getting out of here
shot through his head as he gently bounced on the mattress. But then he jumped up and hooked his fingers over the edge. His shoulders screamed at him, and he let go, knowing he didn’t have the upper-body strength to pull himself up and through. He looked around for something more, noting how that section of the trailer was a little brighter than the rear, but he saw only bolted-down furniture.

The desk.

It was made of hardwood. Gus got down from the bed, pausing while space and time swung him for a loop yet again. When gravity established itself once more, he went to the desk and removed the bottom drawer, long and broad but thin. However, it might do the trick and give him that extra foot necessary for escape.

Gus placed the drawer underneath the hatch and shook his head, knowing he was going to slip off the hardwood bastard and trampoline his dumb ass into a wall where, with his luck, he’d break his goddamn neck. One foot shakily stepped on the box, and Gus panted, tongue steadied between his lips.

He’d have to step and jump, knowing he had only a split second of opportunity before the drawer toppled and took him with it.

Above his head, the open hatchway dared him.

Gus jumped, arms stabbing through the opening and going wide.

Then he fell back.

The edges slammed into his elbows as he dropped. His shoulders shrieked with pain. Gus gasped and scrambled and clawed without coherent thought except to grab for purchase as the hole sucked him back down. His right hand locked onto a metallic knob long enough for his left to grab on to. His feet swung in the air, and for a split second, he looked as though he was driving a car.

A breath of pain and effort squeaked out of him.

With his head and shoulders clear, Gus frantically scanned the roof for something more to grab on to before the trailer pulled him back.

There wasn’t a damn thing in sight, however.

Gus slowly pulled himself free of the hatchway, feeling muscles he’d never known existed lighting up in agony. Creating some slack, he reached beyond his handhold and hooked fingers into an unseen groove. He swore, huffed, and steadied himself, glancing around in wide-eyed determination. The moon shone down on the length of the trailer’s roof, revealing a metallic runway.

“
You sweet
––” he gasped and in one mighty effort, he wormed his upper chest free of the hatchway, enough to rest his torso on the roof. Gus wheezed and smiled, tucked his arms splayed out and letting his legs dangle, knowing he was a breath away from freedom. He looked around and spotted the shapes of about three other trailers, the motor homes, and the armored beast of a dump truck with the enormous tires. The box of that machine had a medieval battlement ringing the top, which struck the geek in him as incredibly cool.

“All right,” he whispered, gathering his second wind.

Someone cleared his throat… directly behind him.

Panic surged through Gus, and he glanced over his shoulder as a boot heel cracked into the side of his head. The hatchway angrily sucked him down, arms flailing like party streamers.

The hard wood drawer took him across the lower back before collapsing.

Gus’s descent stopped on that springy mattress, skewed at an angle. He moaned and didn’t see the head high above, framed in a square.

Sick waited for a few seconds—to make sure the prisoner was breathing—before flicking the lid shut with his boot.

“Tried to get out, eh?”

Gus cracked open an eye and regarded an out-of-focus Jerry, thinking he needed a pair of 3-D glasses. The world behind his brother’s head sped by, as if someone had given the globe one mighty spin on its axis, and Gus took a moment to realize that Jerry had a window at his back.

“Yeah,” Gus replied in all honesty.

“What then?” Jerry demanded.

“What then?”

“Yeah, moron, what then?”

Gus’s wince said,
No need to be
that
way about it
. “Probably would’ve tried freeing them folks.”

“What folks?”

“The ones…” Gus tasted his own tongue and grimaced. Then his eyes widened. “I’m back on the shit!”

“You’re goddamn right, you’re back on the shit. You’re fuckin’ lucky I didn’t have one of the guys just break that fuckin’ skull of yours. Now answer the question.”

Gus discovered that the zed5 was totally screwing up his ability to lie. He tried to hold on to his words, but they squirted free like a soap bar in a dirty bathtub.

“The folks… from Pine Cove.”

“Pine Cove,” Jerry seethed. “That’s the shithole we found you in, right?”

“Yep.”

Jerry’s face glowed with anger.

“Should try some of those dead sprinkles yourself there, Jerry,” Gus suggested, wanting to be helpful.

“Hey, what did I tell you about calling me that name?”

“You said… call you Shovel?”

“That’s right.”

“Aww, c’mon. You still aren’t going on with that, are you?”

But then, on the cusp of being completely whacked out of his gourd, Gus realized others loomed around his brother—scary shades all looking right at him.

Shovel backed up and gestured. “Get him up.”

The brutish men swarmed Gus, nearly yanking his arms free of their sockets. Gus decided it was a good thing he was practically stoned. They dragged him toward a light at the end of a cave, which was really the trailer, and when daylight sunned his features, he actually smiled as if about to embark upon a leisurely walk.

Then they were on the ground, and Shovel walked on ahead, passing a row of transport trailers stopped in one lane of a highway. An unchecked forest grew on either side of the road. Armed men and women watched Gus being helped along, and he even winked at some of the more attractive ladies.

“You’re becoming a pain in the ass, Gussy,” Shovel declared. “I should’ve expected that. You could be a pain in the ass twenty years ago. Listen up. You got one chance at redemption here. One chance.”

Shovel stopped under a too-blue sky. Beside him was a beaten and dazed man on his knees, not two feet away from a very gravelly ditch. Confusion short-circuited Gus’s increasingly warped sense of reality. The kneeling individual’s eyes bloomed an alien shade of purple, transforming them into slits. The guy’s lips looked like a fucked-up Botox experiment. Dull red paint covered his face and chest, enough to make Gus wonder if it wasn’t paint at all.

The ones called Sick and Nolan stood behind the prisoner. Nolan gripped the guy’s shoulder while his other mallet-sized fist swung free.

“Word got out about your little escape attempt,” Shovel explained in a sour tone, “inspiring someone to try their own getaway. Can’t have that among the new recruits, so I’m going to set an example here, or I should say,
you
are.”

Gus blinked in puzzlement at the escapee, recognizing him. “Huh?”

Shovel held out his hand, and Sick slapped a knife into it. Shovel flipped the blade in the air, deftly caught it by the handle, and regarded Gus.