Moriah (21 page)

Frantic screaming and yelling drifted in from outside now. Kevin and Bruce were putting out a lot of lead. Sounded like they had things under control. Men and women were dying out there. Dee knew it wasn’t all because of his friends, either. Zed would be having a field day. The spaces between the cracks from Bruce’s rifle lengthened. Dee chalked that up to a dwindling supply of live targets.

He sat where he was, awaiting anyone who rushed the lobby. No more did.

* * *

“Dee, let’s go.”

“Help me up, Riley.”

She half-lifted, half-supported him as he pulled himself to a standing position, using her as leverage. Bruce and Kevin were waiting downstairs with the fox girl at the door that led out into the lobby.

“Only the one?” inquired Dee.

“Gwen Stefani’s backup singer ran.” Kevin grinned at Bruce’s wisecrack because he was the sole person among them who got it.

“She didn’t run my way.”

“No. He ran down to the fifth floor.” It was the way Riley said it, like the fifth floor should mean something to Dee.

“The fifth floor?”

“The baby,” Riley reminded him.

“Right.” Dee remembered. “
He
?”

“We’ll tell you about it later,” promised Kevin.

“Take me with you,” their hostage pled.

Bruce told her to be quiet.

They fanned out through the lobby, past the crumpled, pulverized forms Dee had shot down. They looked out the doors and took in a landscape marred by death and devastation. A pile of bodies were strewn almost at the doors where Kevin had strafed them, zombies sitting and kneeling, gorging themselves on the wounded.

A couple of pick-up trucks—all that were left—were disappearing down the road, a few survivors cringing in the beds. A wave of zombies followed the departing vehicles. Between the apartment building and the road the landscape was littered with the injured and the dead, vehicles with their tires shot out, others with steam rising from perforated engine blocks. The Howitzer still aimed at the road, the wheels of its flatbed sunk, the interior of the cab splashed red.

At first glance it was impossible to tell which among the unmoving were zombies and which were recently living. Of the ambulatory, the zombies were easy to distinguish, assailing the aggrieved marauders. At some point in the fracas, Bruce had adjusted his aim, shooting to wound and not to kill.

Riley spotted the big man with the rubber bands in his beard. He was bleeding from numerous bites but still swinging his hammer, keeping a circle of ghouls at bay.

Shotgun fire boomed rare and sporadic, the marauders hopelessly outnumbered and routed. Enough of a commotion existed to provide cover for their escape.

“Let’s get out of here,” Kevin suggested. “Bruce, you ride with me.” The third quad was overturned beyond the beer truck and did not warrant the risk of retrieving.

“Take me with you—
please
!”

“Get out of here,” Bruce told Michelle.

“
Please
!”

“Get out of here!” Bruce booted the girl out the door into the open. She looked back at Riley before bolting. Several of the zombies feasting on the nearest of the fallen rose and followed after her.

Bruce and Dee stood guarding either side of the door while Riley and Kevin rolled the remaining quads to the front of the lobby.

“You want to drive?” Riley asked Dee.

“No, you better.”

Kevin and Bruce were the first out of the building. The roar of their quad drew the attention of the living and the dead alike. Only one of the former came forward to challenge them, the camisole clad companion to the leader of the Burning Man Tribe. He ran towards them, firing the pistol he had taken from his dead commander. Kevin put him down with a savage burst from his AK, the flesh of the man’s upper thighs exploding.

Riley accelerated after them, Dee holding on to her. None of the few shots being fired were intended for anyone on the four wheelers. They bounced over a fresh body and swerved around the corroded chassis of a Ford Mustang, relic of a bygone era. Kevin and Bruce made the trees first, lifting off the ground and sailing through the air before plunging into the woods.

Riley circled the quad once at the forest, sparing a last look at the slaughter. A zombie staggered away from its pack, clutching a blood-stained camisole. The giant was down, screeching in that strange high-pitched timbre. The fox girl had pulled herself up on top of the beer truck, a crowd of undead circling it.

“Drive,” Dee suggested, and she did.

Though the bullet he had taken to the back of his skull years before had rendered his eyes useless for sight, his other senses remained sharp. The wrinkled man heard their approach from his cave, what he perceived as a tremble upon the ground, the vibrations of motors. Mechanical buzzes filled the air as they neared. He roused himself and took up his habiliments before their arrival, placing himself at the entrance to his cave, a wizened, unseeing watchman.

When the quad she rode on halted, Riley swung her leg around and dismounted it, stepping to firm ground. The figure that awaited them was a strange site to behold. Short and thin, he wore a welding helmet that encased his entire head in black and silver. His face was hidden behind the tinted glass of the window. In one hand, the man gripped a Caduceus staff, two serpents entwined, surmounted by wings. The staff was taller than the man himself. His other hand was wrapped around a handgun. He stood before an aphotic maw that let onto the earth, as though guarding untold subterranean treasures. The man’s appearance coupled with that morning’s run-in with the Burning Man Tribe left Riley momentarily nonplussed.

The engine of Kevin and Bruce’s quad cut off. Riley noticed how Dee left the big FN scabbarded on their own four-wheeler.

“Fuck those other guys.” Bruce’s delivered his verdict. “
He’s
scary looking.”

“Is he supposed to scare us?” Kevin asked.

“Who has come to this place?” The man called to their group, his voice high and raspy.

“It’s me, Moriarity. Dee. You remember me? I come by here every year. I brought some friends with me.”

“I’ve many memories in this old head. You call me Moriarity, you must have known me as I once was.”

“What name do you go by now?” Dee glanced from Riley to Bruce and Kevin.
Humor the guy
, his seemed to say.

“I was Moriarity. Now I’m Mallory.”

“Come on, man. I know you can’t see me, but don’t act like you don’t know me. I come by this way every year, eat with you, sleep here.”

“What is it you seek?”

“A place to spend the night, Moriarity. Nothing else.”

“I told you, my name is Mallory.”

“Come on, Moriarity, I’m not just going to start calling you Mallory. We been through this crap last year and I told you
then
Moriarity was it from now on.”

“I warn you…” He raised the caduceus towards them. “I wield terrible magic.”

The men and the woman looked at one another. Dee shrugged.

“We’ve got coffee,” offered Kevin.

“Coffee.” Moriarity popped the window on his welding helmet and squinted at the visitors. “You don’t say.” They were indistinguishable to him, blurred shapes against the light of day.

“He’s pretty out there,” Riley remarked to Bruce. Hearing her, Dee muttered, “Just a little bit.”

“Coffee.” Moriarity lifted the welding helmet free of his head, grinning as he did so, his cheeks stubbled white. “Come on over, friends, and let’s partake in some libation and something of a more solid nature. Let me check my traps.”

“We already checked them for you.” Bruce held a dead rabbit up in each hand.

* * *

The old man who was known as Moriarity but wished to be called Mallory was very pleased with the food they brought him, both gathered from his traps and what they bore. They cooked fresh game over a fire under the crisp autumn sky, the hermit’s cave like a mouth in the earth behind them.

They ate and Moriarity bore a look somewhat akin to euphoria as the sugar from a tin of mixed fruit they’d imparted to him hit his system. He used his fingers to spoon it into his mouth until he grew impatient with this method and upended the tin, guzzling its contents, its syrupy juices dribbling down his chin. Kevin looked from the old man licking the syrup from his fingers to Dee and blew out his breath, like
You brought us here
?
To this
?

“Moriarity?”

“Mallory.”

“I’m not calling you that,” Dee reminded him. “You ever hear of an outfit calls themselves Burning Man Tribe?”

Moriarity laughed in confirmation.

“What do you know about them?”

“They fear me. They fear the magic.” He chewed a maraschino cherry. “Why? What do you know of them?”

“They’re pretty much defunct by now.”

The old man laughed.

* * *

Several tins of fruit and peaches later, his appetite sated, Moriarity began to speak. He told them tales of life as it had been. Kevin and Bruce listened with mild interest because they had known some of the things of which he spoke to be true. Having heard the stories before, Dee considered the remains of the meal before them and the lengthening shadows of the day’s end.

Riley weighed the parallels between this blind old man and Krieger, the tracker guide who had delivered herself and her friends to these Outlands. Both had carried staffs. They had that in common. Krieger had put on a good act, like he was disinterested, with no stake in society or civilization. And though Riley and her brother and Evan had found Krieger seated by himself in a bar, he had been social enough that he sought out New Harmony. Unlike this man Moriarity before them with his caduceus and his hole in the earth.

Krieger had died, though his death—Riley was certain—had been premeditated. Still, their tracker guide had not wanted to die alone. Moriarity was out here on his own, separate and apart, blind and alive.

They listened to him talk and watched the night descend about them, wondering if the gloom itself or anything in it was looking back. There was no indication. Bruce stood with the M40 in his arms, a wary eye on the encroaching dark.
Maybe
, Riley thought, Bruce had been right when he’d asked if there couldn’t be another explanation for what they had seen, for what had happened to her brother’s body, to the old man’s. Yet she didn’t think so. And it didn’t look to her like Bruce—standing there eyeing the dark—thought so either.

Moriarity did not invite them into his cave, and even if he had, they probably would not have entered. They most definitely would not have spent the night in it, preferring the open sky and vast plains spread out about them. Only Burning Man’s ineptness had kept them from being trapped in the apartment building.

Kevin asked what he had in his cave, to which Moriarity replied “chotskies, bric-a-brac and books.” Bruce, alone among them standing, asked what kind of books and the old man replied with names none of them had ever heard—Friedman and Hayek and Nozick. When Kevin disregarded Dee’s waved-palm warning—

Don’t get him started
!
Don’t get him started
!

—and asked the old man what the books were about, the hermit launched into an exegesis.

He spoke of ideas and beliefs long forgotten, his speech erudite, rife with esoteric references. Moriarity spoke of the divine right and feudalism and other antiquated human relationships, of the rise of classical liberalism with its emphasis on freedom as the ultimate goal, of the individual human being as the decisive entity in society.

Kevin yawned.

Moriarity said that the state was never meant to get involved in the economy the way it had. Its existence, he assured them, was meant to ensure the freedom of markets at home, free trade among nations, and the protection of individual liberties. But the individualist tradition underlying classical liberalism itself was betrayed, he related sadly, and liberalism went from being the revolutionary doctrine of the free man—
and woman
, he added, with a nod towards Riley though he could not see her—to a mask for coercive, centralized state power.

Kevin had completely tuned him out.

Above them, the stars began to wink into life as the old man waxed poetically about what he and the men whose books he cherished saw as the magic of something he referred to as “the market”. Riley was familiar with markets in New Harmony where she purchased items she needed, but quickly caught on that the market this man spoke to was a larger, all encompassing entity. Moriarity spoke of the “equilibrium” of this market and how individuals were protected in it because sellers always had more buyers and buyers always had more sellers, or that a worker could always find another boss and a boss another worker.

Moriarity pointed out that this was Friedman’s example and not his own, and then he offered another that he posited to Friedman, noting, “When you buy a loaf of bread you don’t know if the wheat it was made out of was grown by a Commie or a Republican, a constitutionalist or a Fascist, a Negro or a white.” Riley would have laughed at the antiquated terms—Negro, Republican, constitutionalist—but the thought of spending a night with this mentally ill man did nothing for her somber mien or spirits.