Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (27 page)

“I don’t have full-time work,
though I do odd jobs from time to time.”

“What kind of odd jobs?”

I shrugged. “Driving, sometimes,
since I have the license. I’ve done some bodyguard work too.”

She was writing on the clipboard.
“Thank you, Mr. Welles. Please take a seat.”

“My driver’s license?” I asked. It
was still in her hand.

“You’ll get it back,” she said.
“Now please, take a seat.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” I smiled
again. She looked past me at the next person in line.

I went around the card tables and
found a seat on the aisle about midway between the last row and the stage.
Captain Konrad watched silently.

A minute or so later, Johnny slid
into the seat next to me. “I guess we’re on our way,” he
whispered.

The words were barely out of his
mouth before Captain Konrad was standing in front of us. “You were ordered
to remain silent after you took your seat,” he said, looking down at
Johnny. “Get up.”

Johnny stood. Konrad studied him.
“There’s always one,” he said softly. “But only one.”

His fist came forward, burying
itself in Johnny’s gut. Konrad stepped back as Johnny went to his
knees.

“When you are given an order by a
superior officer, you will obey it,” he said, looking down. “This is the
Humans First Front, and obedience is not optional.”

Johnny held his belly with both
hands and didn’t look up.

“What’s your name?”

“Johnny Ricci,” he said through
gritted teeth.

“Do you understand me, Mr. Ricci?”
Konrad asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then retake your seat and remain
silent,” Konrad said. “You will not get another warning.”

As Johnny pushed himself up and
fell back into the seat, Konrad walked away.

I stared at the empty
stage.

Johnny said, very softly, “I got
dibs on him.”

Chapter
Seventeen

It took maybe ten minutes before
everyone in the group was done with the questions and took their seats in
front of the stage. Everybody sat silently. Konrad’s demonstration with
Johnny had done it’s job.

When everyone was there, Konrad
made one more circuit around the room, staring at each person in turn. Then
he walked to the front of the room and stepped up on the stage.

“As of now, you are all provisional
members of the Humans First Front,” he said. “Provisional pending
confirmation of your identity and your information.” He paused. “Through
friends, we have access to official records, and each of you will be
thoroughly checked. If any of you have attempted to mislead us or lied, it
will be discovered.”

Konrad smiled. “But because we
believe in all of you, and want you to be part of what we’re doing here, we
will make this offer. If anyone has unintentionally given us incorrect
information about themselves, left something out, added something that’s
not quite true...” He was silent, staring at us. “You get a pass. This one
time. Right now. Stand up, return to your information table, and correct
what you told the aide. This is a one-time offer. If you stay in your seat,
you are guaranteeing that everything you told us is complete and
truthful.”

Silence.

“Anyone?”

Nobody moved. Which was probably
smart. The same routine sometimes worked on suspects in an interrogation
room. One chance to correct their statement.

But all they had to face was the
judicial system. I had a feeling that if you tried to slip one past the
Humans First Front, all you’d have to look forward to was a hole in the
basement floor.

“All right then,” Konrad said. “Let
me tell you about the Humans First Front. We were formed by Commander
Schleu four years ago in Camp Charlie-17, in the Atlanta suburb of
Palmetto, Georgia. There was an uprising in that camp, but our commander
doesn’t think small. She thinks big, and she knew that whatever the outcome
of the uprising, it was not the right time to strike.” He paused. “Because
of that premature uprising, the commander knew that more eyes would be on
the Atlanta area, so when the skeeters let us out of our cages, she brought
us here. There were nineteen of us. Known now as the First
Nineteen.”

I’d heard a lot of this from Jimmy
Joe the night before. But as I looked around the room, most of the people
were listening attentively. Soaking it all in.

“When we arrived here, the
commander’s keen leadership allowed us to grow, and six weeks later, we
numbered more than one hundred.”

Buck James had told me sixty, but a
hundred sounded better. A better tribute to Schleu’s ‘keen
leadership’.

“We took this building from
criminals, mud people and race defilers, and we began to plan.” He paused.
“To devise a way to rid this city of the skeeters and in time, rid our
country as well. Every journey must have a first step, and every war a
first battle. Our first step and first battle will be here. As members of
the Humans First Front, you will be the hammer that breaks humanity’s
chains.”

A few silent nods. Konrad wasn’t as
sharp, as inspirational as Schleu, but the material was good enough for
this audience.

“How do you kill a skeeter?” he
asked suddenly, looking from person to person. “Speak up.”

“Put a stake in his heart,” Johnny
said.

Konrad nodded. “Yes, that would
work. What else?”

“Take him to the beach on a sunny
day,” a guy to my left said, laughing softly.

With a thin smile, Konrad said,
“Yes, that would also work. But good luck getting him to go with you.” He
paused. “What else?”

“Shoot him full of holes,” a woman
behind me said. It sounded like Sue, the woman who’d been in line in front
of me.

“Maybe,” Konrad said. “Depending on
where you shot him.” He paused. “Anybody else?”

“Set him on fire!” a guy to the
right shouted. He was really getting into the spirit of it.

“Maybe,” Konrad said. “But probably
not. Any other guesses?”

“Stop his heart from beating,” I
said.

Konrad turned to me and pointed.
“Yes. That is the correct answer. What’s your name?”

“Charlie Welles,” I
said.

“Good answer, Mr. Welles,” he said.
Then he looked back at the others. “The only sure way to kill a skeeter,
anywhere, day or night, is to stop his heart from beating, stop his blood
from circulating. If the heart stops, the skeeter dies. Almost
instantly.”

He turned back to me. “Do you know
how to do that, Mr. Welles?”

I didn’t like being the center of
Konrad’s attention, but in the end, it might help me. “Shoot him in the
heart,” I said. “Or chop his head off. No connection to the brain, the
Vee’s heart stops.”

“Skeeter,” Konrad said. “We don’t
call them pussy words like Vee. They’re bloodsucking bugs and like any
mosquito, the only way to deal with them is to swat them hard.”

“Sorry,” I said. “The skeeter’s
heart stops.”

He stared at me for a moment, then
nodded. “Correct.” He paused. “You know about this kind of thing, Mr.
Welles.”

I nodded. “Yes, sir,” I
said.

I left it at that. The tale I
planned to tell was for Schleu’s ears, and if Konrad wanted to hear any of
it, he’d have to ask.

He looked at me, long and hard, and
I thought he was going to say something else. Instead, he turned back to
the group.

“I have a little demonstration for
you all,” he said with a smile. “Just something so you can see for yourself
how hard it is to kill a skeeter.” He paused. “Tomorrow, if you’ve all
passed your background check and your interview with the commander, you’ll
have a chance to show me what you’ve learned.”

Interview with the commander. If I
had enough information by then to be sure that I had to kill Schleu, that
might give me an opening.

“Bring him out!” Konrad
yelled.

A door in the back left corner of
the exercise room opened and one of Schleu’s guys pushed something into the
room.

It looked like what they tied
witches to before they burned them. At least in movies. A thick pole, maybe
seven feet tall, mounted on a wooden base with wheels at each
corner.

Bound to the pole was a thin man
with limp dark hair to his shoulders, almost certainly a Vee. He wore a
tattered white tee-shirt and gym shorts. Wide steel bands held him against
the pole, one at his shins, one at his waist, one across the top of his
chest just below his shoulders, and one across his forehead. His arms were
pinned by the bands at his waist and chest. There was a piece of gray
duct-tape across his mouth.

Konrad waited while the guy pushed
the contraption up a ramp on the left side of the low stage and maneuvered
it to the front. The guy unslung a long , black sack from his shoulder and
put it on the floor, then left the stage.

“Let me introduce you all to
Randolph,” he said. “Randolph, these are the first new recruits of the
day.”

Randolph glared at Konrad, but
didn’t make a sound, not even a muffled one behind the
duct-tape.

Konrad turned to us. “As you might
have already guessed, Randolph is a skeeter.” He paused. “But let me
explain that Randolph was not always a skeeter. In fact, Randolph used to
be one of us, a member of the Humans First Front. Three months ago, while
on an operation, Randolph had the poor luck to be turned.” He paused again.
“I was there with him when it happened. And before the skeeter blood
completed its terrible work, Randolph asked me to make his sacrifice mean
something.”

Having just watched Jimmy Joe turn
the night before, I knew that all Konrad had heard from Randolph was maybe
a grunt or two, if that. But it sounded good. Very noble.

“And so we have,” Konrad continued.
“Think of Randolph as a demonstrative aid. A practice dummy, which I will
use to show you exactly how difficult it is to kill a skeeter.”

“Why does he have that tape over
his mouth?” Sue asked from behind me.

Konrad smiled. “That’s an excellent
question,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Sue,”she said. “Sue
Ward.”

“Tell me, Miss Ward, do you know
how skeeters infect humans and turn them?”

“No,” she said.

“It’s the skeeter blood,” he said.
“If just one tiny drop of skeeter blood gets into your good human blood,
you’ll turn into a skeeter. That’s why there’s so many of them. It’s easy.
When the skeeters attacked us, they killed some people outright, sure, but
most they just cut and put a little of their blood into the wound. One of
their favorite things to do is bite their tongue and spit. That little bit
of blood is all it takes.”

He turned to Randolph. “Now
Randolph here used to be one of us, like I said. But once you become a
skeeter, you can’t really help yourself. Randolph might not want to turn me
into a skeeter, or you, or anybody. But the truth is, he’ll try. He’ll
spit. And if his spit, with his skeeter blood in it, gets into a human eye,
or mouth, or maybe on a cold sore or cut that isn’t quite healed up...” He
shook his head. “Well, we’d have another skeeter on our hands. And we only
need one practice dummy.”

That got a rise out of Randolph. He
glared at Konrad again and this time made some noises behind the
tape.

“Easy, buddy,” Konrad said, smiling
at him. “Nobody blames you for what you are.”

He turned back to us. “Before we
begin this demonstration, I want to point something else out to you. You
see those steel bands that hold Randolph to the pole. We use those, instead
of rope or something else, because skeeters are stronger than humans. Not
Superman strong or anything like that, but still very strong. You’ll want
to keep that in mind if you pass the preliminaries and become full members
of the Front. When you’re toe to toe with a skeeter, that kind of knowledge
can save your life.”

He paused. “And there’s one more
thing to remember. Skeeters heal very quickly. In seconds. Sometimes even
faster. You can’t wound them. Your attack has to kill them, or you’ve
wasted it.”

Konrad dug into his pocket and came
out with a switchblade knife. The click, as he pressed the button and the
blade popped out, was loud in the silence of the room. He turned and slashed
Randolph’s exposed left arm.

The cut sealed itself behind the
blade, and when Konrad lifted the knife away, all that remained was a thin
white line on Randolph’s arm that was gone in a few seconds.

“Notice how quickly that cut
healed,” he said. Then he lifted Randolph’s tee-shirt and jammed the knife
into his belly. Randolph jerked and grunted. As Konrad pulled the knife
out, the wound closed immediately.

“We’ve cut skeeters open, and trust
me, you don’t want to see what’s inside their bodies. It’s nothing like
what’s in yours. And everything in there heals up almost
instantly.”