Defiance (The Defending Home Series Book 1) (8 page)

“But that isn’t what happened,” Nicole protested.

“I know it isn’t,” Dale said. “We’re not talking about a rational situation here. A deputy’s been shot and Randy’s got a choice to make—either accept they were to blame and leave us alone, or convince himself and those around him that we were the aggressors and they the victims.”

“Surely they’ll know that’s a lie,” Ann said.

Walter rubbed his gloved hands together. “I’m afraid Dale’s right. The gap between what is and what should be is often too wide to breach. They’ll work hard to spin a story with us as the villains. We can’t do anything to stop that. Maybe that’s the problem when you face down the government and see them blink. It’s a humiliation they don’t soon forget.”

“I’m afraid we can’t afford to lose anyone in order to keep watch,” Dale said. “Which means Colton will need to be propped up by one of the front windows and given a pair of binoculars and a walkie-talkie.”

“That’s something we can do,” Brooke said, motioning to Ann.

They left and Dale watched them walk away, hoping that everything they were doing in the end would help keep them safe. It was bad enough that Clay had been shot by one of their own. But what Dale hated most was how quickly the situation had spiraled out of his control. He was a man who searched for order in everything that he did and now he was facing a powder keg just waiting to explode.

Zach

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Z
ach reached Pueblo, Colorado on his journey toward Interstate 25 and noticed the town was far more active than Canon had been. A handful of cars were on the road, navigating through intersections without bothering to stop or even slow down. Small groups of people were also moving in and out of broken store windows. But it wasn’t electronics they were after. What good was a stereo without power?

On the other side of the boulevard, he watched a patrol car pull up to the store, lights flashing. At once, those pillaging inside came scurrying out like cockroaches, running in every direction.

Zack quickly turned off East 4
^th
Street and into a suburban neighborhood. While he felt comfortable the cops weren’t out looking for him, he also figured there wasn’t any point taking chances.

He cruised down narrow streets, punctuated by small two-story houses with pointed roofs. He made three more rights before settling on the one he would burglarize. If there was one thing he knew for damn certain, he wasn’t going to make it to Encendido driving an ambulance and dressed in a hospital gown.

Climbing down from the cab, Zach gripped the back flap of his gown to keep from flashing the neighborhood. He might not keep to the law, but at least he intended to keep his dignity.

A quick eye up and down the street revealed a distinct lack of activity. Either folks were hiding or they were already dead.

Circling around the back of a small white house, he went straight away to the sliding glass door. It was locked and he swore. A large, inviting rock sat less than five feet away, but without any shoes, shattering the glass would only slice open the soles of his feet. He opted instead to hop the fence, trying two more adjacent houses, before he found an unlocked back door.

Pushing his way inside, he crept through a narrow laundry room, his nose hit at once by the smell of fabric softener. The odor was pleasant, reminding him of the home life he’d lost so many years ago. Lori had said she loved him, had said she’d never leave him, and yet she had committed the ultimate betrayal by going to the cops and telling them everything she knew. It didn’t seem to matter that he’d only robbed those banks up in Colorado so that Colton would have a shot at going to university. To provide his son the kinds of opportunities that had never been open to him. Lori would have argued Zach’s lack of job prospects was his own fault and she would probably have a point.

He’d lied when they’d first met in Denver, told a young and beautiful university sophomore who said her name was Lori that he was studying banking, not even sure such a course even existed. That was the life of a con man, wasn’t it? You bent the truth in every which way and the more you believed your own lie, the more others did too. By the time they were married and had a son on the way, it was too late for her to just up and leave. He’d locked her down as thoroughly as Florence Supermax had done to him.

All that mattered was a steady source of income to keep them afloat, and Zach had taken up the challenge, knocking off convenience and liquor stores with the same regularity as normal guys woke up every morning and went to the office. As the bills began to rise, grabbing a few hundred dollars here and there was no longer cutting it and so Zach had gotten three of his buddies together and turned their attention to spearing larger fish—namely the Bank of America.

Zack was passing through the kitchen when he heard the man’s voice.

“What are you doing in my house?” The guy’s sickly skin was the color of a rotting orange. He was an older man—sixties, maybe more—wearing a bathrobe and carrying a Dirty Harry revolver. Zach wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to get on his knees and beg for forgiveness. He decided on a third option, raising his hands into the air, signaling his intention to surrender. Zach let out a cough, feigning sickness as he lunged forward and knocked the gun from the old man’s grip. It made two lazy circles through the air before tumbling to the ground and discharging. The deafening sound nearly broke his eardrums. The old guy pivoted, intent on retrieving the weapon, but Zach, at least twenty-five years his junior, was there first.

Gun in hand, he rose to his feet, eyeing the old man up and down as he trained the barrel over his heart.

A woman’s voice erupted from upstairs.

“Harold, what’s going on down there? Are you all right?”

“Tell her everything’s fine, Harold,” Zach instructed him. “The gun went off on its own, but no one’s hurt.”

Harold did as he was told.

Zach stood in his hospital gown, eyeing Harold from the floor up. 

“What size waist do you wear?”

The old man looked surprised by the question. “I’m a thirty-four.”

Zach smiled. “Lucky for me.” His finger twitched and the .44 Magnum kicked in his hand.

Harold hit the ground like a sack of potatoes and that was when the screaming upstairs started up again. The wife knew something was wrong, said she was calling the police. It was something of a miracle she was even still alive, given the sad state Harold was in. Zach wasn’t worried about catching the old man’s flu. He’d been through the wringer already and come out the other side, fit as a fiddle. In medical terms it meant he was immune. Maybe the old lady was too, not that it would matter.

Randy

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R
andy Gaines and a deputy named Stan Lewis arrived at the Teletech production plant around three in the afternoon. Ever since leaving the clinic, Randy had been thinking about his brother Clay. One gunshot to the chest and one to the neck had left Clay clinging to life in critical condition. Randy wasn’t sure what he’d do if his younger brother passed away. The one small generator the town owned was being used at the hospital to treat the sick and to keep Clay alive. It was at moments like these that Randy realized how much we took simple things like lights and electricity for granted.

After finding a spot to park his cruiser, Randy killed the engine, took a deep breath and glanced up at the ominous factory.

“Why on earth does Mayor Reid insist on headquartering here?” Randy asked Lewis beside him.

“The hell should I know?” his deputy replied. “Maybe it reminds him of the good ol’ days.”

Although he’d tossed the question out there to rattle off some steam, Randy thought he knew perfectly well the answer to his question. The new mayor was by far the town’s wealthiest inhabitant with an impressive gated Spanish colonial-style mansion off one of the main streets.

In the early days of the virus, Hugh Reid had lain low, the same as everyone else. At the time, the pandemic had been spreading like a grass fire in the prairies, jumping from fathers making final runs on the grocery store or mothers trying desperately to empty the joint checking account to the rest of the family, waiting huddled and terrified back at home. Hardly anyone knew that the faster a virus moved and the faster it killed, the quicker it would cut itself off from finding new hosts. Most of them couldn’t live outside a body―human or swine in this case―for longer than a few hours. For his new boss, Hugh Reid, even the walls around his palatial home hadn’t been high enough to keep out the sickness.

Like the common cold, one never really knew for sure who had passed it on. Somehow, not long after Hugh’s wife had returned from a quick errand, their two twins, Alexander and Patrick, had complained they weren’t feeling well. Soon, they’d discovered Hugh’s wife had it too. They had been quarantined in the eastern wing of the mansion, Hugh visiting them dressed in a gas mask and plastic dish gloves. Hugh had told Randy the kids were terrified of the way he looked. Until two days later, all three of them were dead. Hugh had buried them in the backyard.

It seemed after that something inside Hugh had changed. Randy wasn’t any kind of relationship expert—heck, he hadn’t been in a monogamous relationship his entire life—but he’d seen enough TV to know that Hugh’s wife had been the man’s moral compass, perhaps the only thing keeping his darker ambitions at bay. Now that she was gone, Hugh had been faced with a decision: get up and keep living or swallow both barrels of a shotgun. He’d chosen the former and that was when he’d called Randy.

Randy and Stan pulled open a side door and stepped onto the cavernous factory floor. Weak strands of light bled in from windows high above them. Stan tripped on a discarded pallet and swore.

In response, Randy switched on his flashlight and speared the path ahead. This wasn’t the first time they’d come here, probably wouldn’t be the last, but whenever they did, Randy couldn’t shake the eerie feeling that crept through his bones. The skeletal frames of half-finished flatscreen TV sets lined one of the assembly lines. It looked as though a giant hand had come and yanked out an equally giant plug, grinding everything to a halt. The only thing missing was the distant sound of dripping water. Arizona was too damn dry for that, especially now.

Outside, they listened to the parched wind push against a tall metal door. The rhythmic clanging echoed through the factory floor, matching pace with each tentative step they took.

Eventually, they arrived at a set of stairs and began to ascend. Mayor Reid’s office was at the top. He’d been a rather fat man when the pandemic hit, somewhere close to three hundred pounds—the blowback, Randy assumed, from years of dinners in fancy restaurants around the country, eating rich-guy foods with unpronounceable names.

A room soon came into view up ahead, light outlining the closed double doors.

Randy and Stan stopped before them and knocked.

A voice from inside told them to come in.

The office was spacious, with a desk at one end and two leather couches at the other. Framing the room was a large corner window that overlooked the town. Mayor Reid was standing before it, surveying the comings and goings of the few visible shapes down below.

When he turned, Randy felt a silent jolt surge through his body. He spoke with the man every day, saw him face to face just as often, and yet he still couldn’t help marveling at the transformation. The mayor had dropped close to a hundred pounds since the death of his wife and kids. The once rounded jowls that had given his face a bowed, jovial look had since been replaced with a pair of pronounced eyes and high, protruding cheekbones. The visual was a strange one to behold, even disturbing. It looked as though a wet cloth had been draped over a man’s skull.

“I expect you boys have come with good news,” the mayor said, his voice surprisingly deep.

Randy cleared his throat. “Well, that depends on what you mean by good.”

“I was speaking about Clay.”

“Oh.” Randy’s demeanor changed as his body shuddered, reliving the event. “No word yet. He’s in critical condition. But the doctor’s hopeful.”

Hugh walked over and settled on the corner of his desk. He was wearing a suit that fit his new shape surprisingly well. “That is good news. Now,” he said, tapping the edge of the desk with his wedding ring finger. “Above everything else, we need to get this town back under control,” he said. “I could have sworn I made that perfectly clear to you the day I handed you this job.”

Sheriffs were normally elected positions and Randy didn’t miss the subtle jab. Reid was reminding him who he owed his allegiance to. But that knife cut both ways, didn’t it? Reid himself hadn’t exactly been elected either. The chaos of the past few weeks had made that impossible.

“Between keeping the remaining townsfolk from looting our own stockpiles,” Randy said, “and gathering the resources we need to keep things running smoothly, we’re stretched thin enough to snap. Our biggest challenge has been finding accessible drinking water.”

The mayor ignored Randy’s subtle plea for additional men. “Remind me why we can’t use a generator to draw up water from the city’s reservoir.”

“We don’t have one and the well’s too deep for hand pumps,” Randy explained. “Getting it out is one thing, treating it so it doesn’t make you sick or kill you is another. The few idiots who have tried didn’t last long. Now we’ve managed to get our hands on a handful of local wells, using archaic laws to expropriate people’s land like you said we should, but even that hasn’t been enough.” On the mayor’s desk were a series of rolled-up maps. Randy moved past him and spread one out, holding the ends flat with the palms of his hands. It was a geological survey which revealed the known sources of water in the area. One particular property on the outskirts of town showed an enormous aquifer.

“There’s enough clean water here to keep the town going for at least two years.”

Mayor Reid pushed his finger down on that same spot. “So this is the one who’s been giving you all this trouble?”