Night and Day (Book 3): Bandit's Moon (29 page)

The living room was pretty large,
but nearly empty. A couch with no legs against one wall with a battered
wooden coffee table in front of it. A beat-up lounge chair with a pile of
paperbacks next to it. Big window at the far end, covered by a sheet tacked
up across it. That was the living room.

“Ain’t much, but it’s comfortable,”
he said as he turned to face us. “Least it’s warm, you know what I
mean?”

I nodded. I wasn’t going to tell
him that I thought it was nice. Zach didn’t need to know what a liar I
am.

He pointed to our left. “Kitchen,”
he said. “Nothin’ in there works but the faucet, but that don’t matter
none. They bring up breakfast and supper. But you do need to keep your own
bowl and spoon clean. I ain’t your maid, and I don’t want cockroaches
runnin’ around the kitchen.”

He pointed to our right. “Bedrooms
and shitter. You two share the shitter in the hall, I got a private one in
my bedroom.” He paused. “Closest bedroom is yours, the one with two
mattresses. I’m in the one in back.”

“This will be fine, Zach,” I said.
“We appreciate you giving us a place to sleep.”

He shrugged. “Part of havin’ a
two-bedroom apartment,” he said. “When I moved down here outta that little
one bedroom shitbox on three last month, I knew what I was gettin’ into.
Don’t bother me none. Constant stream of new folks to talk to.”

“New recruits, like us?”

Zach nodded. “Yeah, in and out.
Been goin’ on for damn near the whole month.” He paused. “Hey, where’s my
manners?” He turned and waved at the couch. “Ya’ll have a seat and we’ll
talk for a bit. If they want me to go out again, Gus’ll come fetch
me.”

Johnny and I sat down. Zach flopped
into the lounge chair and grinned. “Just tellin’ you right now, this is
my
chair. Nobody sits in this chair but me. I relax here and do my
readin’ when I ain’t on the job.”

“I know exactly where you’re coming
from,” I said. “I have my own chair like it at home.” I paused. “So where
do they go? The new recruits, when they move out?”

He smiled. “I don’t ask and they
don’t tell,” he said. His smile widened to a grin. “Like that fag thing in
the military, you know?” He paused and the smile faded. “Lemme give you both
a word of advice. Don’t ask people what they’re doin’ ‘round here, and
don’t say what you’re doin’. One of the bigwigs like Shep or the commander
gives you your orders, you do what they tell you to and keep your mouth
shut.”

“Shep?”

“Randy Sheppard,” he said.
“Commander’s right hand man. He usually ain’t around and the commander
doles out the assignments, but when he is, you’ll know it. Loud
son-of-a-bitch with a bald head and a big thick beard.”

And according to Sgt. Olsen, now
lying on a metal tray in the Uptown District cooler. Or already tossed into
the incinerator.

“How about Captain Konrad,” Johnny
asked. “Where does he fit in?”

“Konrad is just a trainer,” Zach
said. “Nazi sumbitch.” He shook his head. “Gotta say, I never did
understand them nazis they got ‘round here. I mean, sure, I don’t like
niggers or Mexicans. They live filthy, steal jobs from white folks, as well
as anything else they can get their hands on. And they breed like rabbits.
But Jews? Hell, we had a Jew neighbor lady, Miz Finkel, had a farm near us.
She and Mr. Finkel was the nicest people you ever wanna meet.”

I nodded. “We had our first
training session with him today.”

“Konrad used to be the trainin’
assistant,” Zach said. “Joe Randolph gave him the job when him and his nazi
bunch showed up ‘bout a year ago. Joe didn’t like him much, but I think the
commander asked him to give him the job, to help make the nazis feel
welcome. They got some funny ideas, but most of ‘em are damn good
fighters.”

“Randolph? The...”

Zach nodded. “Yeah, that’s ol’ Joe
that Konrad uses to teach the recruits. Don’t know what happened out there,
and don’t wanna know. Joe took Konrad and some other nazis out on a scout
couple of months ago, and they all agreed that Joe got turned durin’ a
fight with a couple of skeeters.”

“What did Joe say?”

“Joe’s a skeeter now,” Zach said.
“Don’t matter what he said. Cap’n Kat ain’t gonna believe a word out of his
mouth. Whatever he said, commander made Konrad the new trainer and let him
use Joe for demonstrations.”
 

He shook his head. “Lotta us who
been here from the start don’t think it’s right. Joe’s one of the First
Nineteen, like me and a few of the other boys. Which ain’t no big thing, if
you was thinkin’ that I’m braggin’. Just happened to be in the right place
at the right time. But one of us shouldn’t be used like that. Konrad
shoulda put a bullet in Joe’s heart when he turned, let him go out with
some dignity, you know?”

“Konrad said Joe told him to do it
this way,” Johnny said. “So he could still help.”

Zach laughed. “Yeah, I’m sure
Konrad said a lot of things.” He paused. “You notice, he never takes that
tape off Joe’s mouth when anybody else is around.” He paused again. “Course
I don’t know anything for sure. Maybe Joe did tell him that before the
skeeter blood took hold. Anyway, Joe is a skeeter now, so I guess we might
as well get some use outta him.”

He leaned back in the chair.
“That’s what I like best about this. Havin’ new folks to jaw with. Didn’t
get much of that growin’ up.”

“How come?” Johnny
asked.

“You a city boy?” Zach asked
him.

Johnny nodded. “Yeah, born and
raised downtown.”

“How ‘bout you, Charlie?” he
asked.

“I grew up in a small town in
Kansas,” I said. “Spent some time in the Army, then moved here and been
here since.”

“How’d you like that small town
livin’?” he asked with a grin.

“It was quiet,” I said.

“Yeah, it is that,” Zach said. “See
I come from St. Matthews, down the road from Columbia.”

“South Carolina?”

He nodded. “Yeah, my folks had a
farm outside town. Didn’t mix much with people. Lotta niggers in St.
Matthews, so me and my brother stayed mostly to home and worked the farm.
Didn’t have much chance to talk to people outside the family, ‘cept at
school, and I didn’t have a lot of friends. Benjie had a lot
more.”

“Benjie?”

“My brother, Benjamin.” He smiled.
“Benjie was the smart one. Good lookin’ fucker, too. Always had a girl on
his arm.”

“Is Benjie here too?”

He shook his head. “Nah, I don’t
know where he is. See, when the skeeters attacked Columbia, my pop sent me
down to Uncle Zed’s in Atlanta. Said he and momma would be along after they
closed up the farm. Wanted Benjie to go with me, but he had other
ideas.”

“Like what?”

“Like gettin’ the hell outta
Dodge,” Zach said with a laugh. “Like I said, he was the smart one. He saw
the writin’ on the wall. We wasn’t gonna be able to stop the skeeters,
leastways not then. So he took Marla, his girlfriend, jumped in his
pick-up, and headed for Charleston. Said he was gonna find him a boat and
go someplace else till the dust settled.”

“Did he?”

Zach shrugged. “If he did, he
didn’t send me no postcards. Maybe yes, maybe no. Skeeters took Charleston
a few days later, so if him and Marla got out, they was quick about
it.”

“What about your
parents?”

“You know, my pop said he was gonna
come down to Uncle Zed’s when he closed up the farm, but he was a hard ass.
Not a runner. Viet Nam vet. Long as pop had a gun, and trust me, he had
plenty, he wasn’t gonna leave the farm to no skeeters.” He paused. “Wish
I’d had one of them guns when the skeeters got to Atlanta, but I didn’t,
and Uncle Zed didn’t either. He was a man of peace, lay preacher. When
Atlanta surrendered, we both got picked up and herded into Camp Charlie-17.
Too bad God wasn’t lookin’ out for him like he’d looked out for God. Got
snatched in one of the first blood lotteries and that was that.”

“Sorry to hear that,” I said. “I
guess we all have stories like that.”

He nodded. “Yeah, well, I never
liked that sanctimonious bastard anyway. Always talkin’ about sin.” He was
silent for a moment, then smiled. “But hell, I don’t want to talk about me.
What about you guys?”

I looked at Johnny. “Not much to
tell,” he said. “Grew up in the city, went to school. Bloodsuckers come,
went into a camp, came out. Knocked around on the streets for a while, then
got a job cleaning an office building. Which I quit this
morning.”

“Heard that part in the bar,” Zach
said. “Don’t worry, my man, I was tellin’ you the truth. You’re gonna have
your chance to get back at that skeeter.” He paused. “And by the way, don’t
call ‘em bloodsuckers or nothin’ like that. Call ‘em skeeters.” He paused.
“I don’t care myself. Hell, I called ‘em bloodsuckers till I hooked up with
Cap’n Kat in the camp. But the commander is real particular about that.
Best to just go with the flow, like they say.”

Zach turned to me. “How ‘bout you,
Charlie? Kansas, then the Army, then here. You see any combat when you was
in the Army?”

I shook my head. “No, spent my
whole enlistment stateside.”

“That’s too bad,” he said. “Least
you’re gonna be seeing some combat pretty soon, and against the real
enemy.”

“Yeah, what about that?”

“Cap’n Kat got somethin’ big
brewin’. I can’t say what. My job is bar duty right now, and that’s what I
concentrate on, for the reasons I mentioned before. Ask too many questions
‘round here and they make you go away.”

“Throw you out of the
outfit?”

He smiled humorlessly. “Yeah.
Somethin’ like that.”

Zach clearly didn’t want to talk
about the basement with us. Probably didn’t think it would help our
morale.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll stop asking
those kinds of questions.” I paused, then went for the reverse play. “It’s
just that everybody keeps saying that we’re going to clean out all the
skeeters here in town, even in the whole country. You said it. Konrad said
it. Even the commander said it.”

“Ain’t nobody lyin’ to you ‘bout
that, Charlie,” he said. “It’s all true.”

“But how do you know?” I asked. “If
nobody’s talking, and your job isn’t part of it, how can you say that for
sure?”

“I didn’t say my job weren’t part
of it,” he said with a sly smile. “I mean, you’re here, ain’t
you?”

“So we’re part of it?”

“You’re a smart guy, Charlie. Think
about it. What do you think you’re here for? Why do you think Konrad is
teachin’ you how to kill skeeters?”

I shrugged. “You tell
me.”

“In the past two months, we’ve had
at least six hundred new recruits come through here,” Zach said. “Just like
you and Johnny. And all of ‘em got the same trainin’ as you.”

“There are more than six hundred
people in this building?” I shook my head. “You’re kidding,
right?”

Zach laughed. “They ain’t here,” he
said. “I told you. They come, they go. They get trained and the commander
moves them out.”

“Where?”

“Now that I do not know,” he said.
“But I can make an educated guess. You got six hundred trained skeeter
killers. Where do you send them?”

“Where the skeeters are,” I
said.

“There you go,” he said. “And where
are the skeeters in this city?”

“All over,” Johnny said.

“Yeah, but there’s a place that’s
almost all skeeters,” Zach said. “I ain’t never been there myself, but I’m
told it’s the nicest part of town.” He paused. “If you like skeeters, that
is.”

“Uptown,” I said.

He nodded. “That’s what I’m
thinkin’,” he said.

Randall Sheppard had been killed in
an uptown subway station, probably gunned down by Redmond’s people. A few
days before that, somebody matching his description had been seen at The
Hole by Terry Legs.

It was time to see how far Zach’s
educated guesses went.

“That’s crazy,” I said, shaking my
head. “You may not have been to uptown, but I have. It’s ninety percent
residential. There’s some stores, but it’s mostly just apartments and
townhouses.”

“Yeah,” he said. “And who’s inside
those townhouses and apartments, Charlie? The ones nobody moved back into
after the war?”

I didn’t buy it. There might have
been plenty of abandoned apartments in other parts of town, left empty when
the occupants fled during the war or died in the camps. But not in uptown.
Like Zach said, it was the nicest part of town. During the two and a half
years the human population of the city was in internment camps, Vees had
staked out a claim on the best the city had to offer. That meant
uptown.

I knew that personally. A Vee had
taken my apartment in uptown while I was in the camp.

“There are no empty townhouses in
uptown, Zach,” I said. “No empty apartments.”

“They don’t necessarily have to be
empty,” he said. “Say some skeeter was sleepin’ one sunny day and somebody
broke in. Who’s there now? The rightful owners or some folks who cut the
heads off them rightful owners and are hunkered down, waiting for the bugle
to sound so they can finish the job on the rest of them?”