The Nothing Men, page 5
part #1 of The Nothing Men Series
“We’re not animals, Ben,” Luke said, his voice ramping back up in intensity, like a lathered-up preacher. Ben felt like he was being hypnotized. “We deserve better. We deserve a life.”
Ben was nodding his head with each word. He hadn’t even been aware he was doing it, and he thought about church and the way a minister swept up his parishioners in an ecclesiastical funnel cloud, thundering away about sin and temptation and God and Jesus and everlasting life that awaited the faithful.
“How about we take a little ride?”
6
Luke and George waited outside while Ben packed up his tent. Despite having spent nearly a year here, there wasn’t much to take. A flashlight here. A can of tuna over there. As he packed, Ben considered this twist of fate, this fork in the road. He didn’t know where this new road would carry him, but he could always hope that he was headed somewhere better. After all, it couldn’t be much worse than his current lot in life.
Somewhere better. A concept ever out of reach, reinforced by Freedom One’s daily propaganda efforts. Reconstruction updates. Stories of economic recovery. A glimmer here. A spark there. A big, bright, shiny NEW AMERICA was waiting for all of them, just around the next bend. He’d certainly watched his share of television when he could; there had been that need to believe that someone was at the wheel, that things were in motion, that adults were in charge. But eventually, he realized that there was nothing new under the government-sponsored media sun; it was going to be a long hard slog until it wasn’t anymore.
After giving the tent one final lookover, Ben joined Luke and Laprade outside. It was getting dark. Thin clouds streamed across the sky, the crescent moon breaking through like the smile of a pretty girl at a crowded party.
“You ready?” Luke asked.
“I guess so.”
His time at this camp was done. They made their way through the infield, winding their way through the maze of tightly bunched tents. As he had back at the job lottery, Ben felt the stares of his campmates, but he found himself not caring. He hadn’t made the world the way it was. Any of them would do what he was doing.
A black Ford Explorer was parked on an access road on the complex’s western perimeter. The Department’s logo emblazoned on the driver’s side door. He stopped suddenly.
“What’s wrong?” Luke asked. He followed Ben’s gaze. “Oh, that. Yeah, this comes in handy.”
“You stole it?”
“Not exactly,” Luke said. “Rest assured, it’ll get the job done.”
The trio piled into the car, Laprade at the wheel, Ben in the back seat, and they set off down Laburnum Avenue, once a busy artery connecting the city to the airport in the eastern part of the metro area. Ben sat quietly in the back as the landscape rushed by. He’d gone to law school in Richmond, before moving to North Carolina to start his career. It was a long enough stay that it now resembled a demented funhouse version of a place he’d once known very well. Even three years later, it was still dizzying to see the devastation, the ruined buildings.
They passed a bowling alley, one he’d frequented during his third year of law school. It became a tradition, he and his buddies sloshing through half a dozen pitchers of icy cold Budweiser on Tuesday nights while betting five dollars a game. He’d actually developed some aptitude for the game, regularly breaking two hundred; he’d even considered buying his own ball. But then he graduated and met Sarah while studying for the bar exam and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d even gone bowling.
The façade of the building had been blown away, twisted rebar and cables and broken concrete still exposed like ruined entrails. Sandbags ringed the parking lot. Skeletal remains lay draped over a low brick wall in front of the building. A goddamn bowling alley. It reminded him how insane this war had been, how it had been fought on every front, how it had been fought not for oil or food or religion, but for their very survival. War at its most elemental. There were no cease-fires, no backroom negotiations, no compromises, just five months of all-out war and death and destruction until it was over.
The bowling alley faded behind them but ahead lay more of the same. They passed a gas station offering unleaded for $13.59 a gallon, down from its peak at about sixteen bucks. At the peak of the war effort, the government had prohibited the private use of fuel, saving it for the massive military operations underway in every corner of the continental United States. But many of the pipelines had sustained heavy damage, and even after the war, there weren’t enough truckers still alive to transport what fuel remained. Globally, the price of crude oil had zoomed to three hundred dollars a barrel. A number of surviving members of Congress had called on the President to simply carpet-bomb the OPEC nations out of spite. Eventually, the country had dipped into the Strategic Petroleum Reserves, which had stabilized the prices.
“Put this on,” Luke said, flinging something into Ben’s lap once they’d reached cruising speed on Interstate 64. Ben held the object up to the ambient moonlight. It was a ski mask, the eyeholes stitched closed with scrap fabric. He pulled it on, his heart pounding as the world went dark around him. He hated to put it on, to surrender one of his senses, but the die was already cast. He was already at their mercy; wearing a ski mask for the duration of the trip wasn’t going to affect his non-existent bargaining position one way or another.
He leaned back in his seat and settled in for the ride, loosing a yawn. He was tired. So very tired. The rhythmic hum of the highway finally wrapped its arms around Ben and pulled him down into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Ben woke up to the sound of the Explorer chunking along an unpaved stretch of road, pitching and yawing its way in the darkness.
“Where are we?” Ben asked, blowing a lungful of warm air into his cupped hands and rubbing them together.
“Home,” Luke said. “You can take off the mask.”
He peeled it off his head and tossed it on the seat next to him. He leaned forward in his seat to get a better look, but he could see no farther than the sweep of the headlights. The road was wide, well-traveled, bisecting a sprawling expanse of farmland to his right and a thick forest of oak and pine to his left. A light rain was falling; every few seconds, the intermittent wipers swept across the windshield. The dashboard was lit up like a spaceship. It was cold in the car, and Ben, wearing only shorts and a t-shirt, shivered in its stale chill.
Luke wasn’t forthcoming with any additional details, so he sat back and leaned his head against the window. The rain started to pick up, and with it came a corresponding increase in the squeak of the wiper blades. Ben started to feel a tincture of regret slowly working through him like an intravenous drip. Things hadn’t been peachy keen back at the Raceway, but at least he had been at the helm of his own ship. Now he’d entrusted his future to other people, people he did not know, and worse, people whose agenda he did not know. He didn’t even know where he was. Something so elemental, so basic, that you took it for granted until you were riding with two guys who might very well be casting you as the city boy in their backwoods revival production of Deliverance.
How had things gotten so far off track?
Were things so bad that he’d simply signed up for the first cult he’d come across? He felt like an Iowa farm girl stepping off a cross-country bus in downtown Los Angeles with a head full of movie posters and A-list parties and then two weeks later signing up with a production company, something with a suggestive name like Electric Skin Video, agreeing to do a little soft-core work, no penetration or anything like that, just something to pay the bills until a better opportunity presented itself.
On the other hand, it had been a long year. He was out of food, out of money, out of options. He’d raided as many empty houses as he could, looking for dry cereal, canned goods, bottled water, anything that he could use, and that had worked for a while. But, of course, he wasn’t the only one with that idea, and the pickings grew slimmer with each passing week. Even when he’d had a job, hyper-inflation had chewed up the mileage he was getting out of his dollars, the way a dirty gas line sucked away a car’s fuel efficiency. Simply waltzing into a supermarket with a fistful of coupons just wasn’t an option anymore. The distribution channels that had kept America fat and fed had collapsed during the Panic, bearing out the pessimistic forecasts that the country, for all its bounty, had been just one major disaster away from mass starvation.
A few months before he’d found the camp at the raceway, he’d hooked up with a nomadic group of a dozen Redeyes, moving from town to town, relying on handouts from churches, mosques, temples, and other charitable organizations. He was not surprised that the megachurches turned their backs on the needy. Once, during a particularly barren stretch, the three children in the group, all orphans, all under the age of ten, kept asking Ben when they would find some food.
I’m hungry, Benny.
Yeah, we’re hungry.
Yeah.
He had no answer for them, other than soon, soon, they would find something to eat soon. But they hadn’t, and two weeks into their starvation diet, Kelsey, the nine-year-old, died. She passed in her sleep; she simply did not wake up. She was about the same age as Gavin. The group dissolved shortly after that.
And much as he couldn’t handle facing his friends and family again any more than they could handle dealing with the monster in the family, the loneliness had started to wear on him. No better way to alienate your loved one than by trying to tear them to pieces. He’d been alone, looking for something that was lost, except there would be no happy ending because that thing would never be found unless they could all somehow shove the planet into a time machine and zip backward three years.
As the truck pierced deeper into the dark countryside, Ben thought about his neighbors in the tent city. Some had been friendly, others aloof, others simply certifiably insane, but he hadn’t bothered learning a single name. It had been easier to work in knowing glances and wide berths. Orchid wasn’t a disease that they organized five-kilometer races for. No one was running with a race bib bearing his name. People didn’t gather to celebrate Orchid’s eradication or the miraculous recovery of its victims.
Maybe he should have gotten to know his fellow Redeyes, but Ben didn’t want to think about what had happened, and getting together with other Reds would require talking about it because what the hell else were they going to talk about? The Iowa caucuses? Global warming? Duke basketball?
“We’re almost there,” Luke said, snapping Ben out of his trance.
White light glowed softly in the distance, off to his right, a shining beacon in the center of all that dark land. Electricity. Electricity was still at a premium in many places, a few hours a day at best, and in some ways, Ben had come to see it as a liability, a gigantic blinking sign that said, PLEASE ROB AND MURDER ME! His disdain for artificial light didn’t make him impervious to danger, of course, he was under no illusion of that, but lighted houses were easy targets. It was simple math, really; far more houses were dark than were lit up. As the saying went, the bad guys didn’t want to kill, rape, or rob you. They just wanted to kill, rape or rob someone. And bad guys didn’t like hassle any more than the average person.
Despite the warm glow ahead, he was still totally lost, stripped of any sense of direction, which, he decided, was a pretty good metaphor for the current state of his life. As they drew closer, the scene began to sharpen, and the primordial ooze of light began to take form. A moment later, Luke decelerated and turned right onto a hidden drive. The road, flanked by magnolias, narrowed here, and as their destination grew in the windshield, Ben felt a spike of warmth up his back. His breathing became ragged and shallow, and he could feel his blood pulsing in every single extremity.
“Relax, Ben,” Luke said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
The main house came into view a moment later. Antebellum-style, reminiscent of the ones Ben knew from Southern literature, enormous, roughly the size of one of Saturn’s moons. Marble columns lining the façade gave it an imposing, castle-like feel, inaccessible to the common man. Huge oaks, full grown at the time of the Civil War, provided an additional layer of natural defense. Beyond the main house were a half dozen or so additional smaller guesthouses, the pawns to the queen of this very southern chessboard.
As the Explorer looped onto the main circular driveway fronting the house, Ben could see that as big as the house was, it was but a drop in the bucket of acreage. The house itself was brightly lit, as though it were ready to host a New Year’s Eve party for the ages, but rather than warmth, the glow exuded a sense of alarm and anger. A middle finger to a world that had gone dark in so many places. It was disarming to see a place so well-kept, so manicured, somehow immune to the disaster that had swept the globe, as if such things were beneath it.
And all these thoughts he was having, Ben realized, were exactly the point.
As Luke brought the Explorer to a stop, Ben pulled his backpack close to him, a buoy in a sea of confused WhatTheHellHaveIGottenMyselfInto? He alighted from the car and joined the men as they climbed the steps and slipped past the giant columns that made Ben think of a prison for giants.
“Welcome to the Haven,” Luke said.
The house was even larger than Ben had anticipated. A formal staircase, wide at the bottom and narrowing toward the top like a giant pouf of swept-up hair, greeted them in the foyer. To his right was a formal dining room, its layout tucked just out of view, the type of room Ben always imagined for men with money to sit and plot.
“We’ve got a room for you upstairs,” Luke said.
Now THAT seemed a little weird. Sort of presumptuous, to be quite honest.
“You guys haven’t even bought me dinner,” he said, hoping to break the awkwardness he suddenly felt.
Luke laughed, and Ben relaxed a little. It was the right kind of laugh, the kind that told him that Luke got the joke.
“There’s no point in trying to hide it,” Luke said, holding out his arms in an aw-shucks sort of pose. “We’re trying to recruit you. Your first night here, you get the deluxe package.”
“Recruit me for what?”
“We’ll get to all that tomorrow,” Luke said. “When was the last time you had a good night’s sleep?”
Ben rubbed his chin as he considered the question, the never-ending struggle of the past year weighing heavily on his mind. Before the Panic, he had been keenly aware that he had never experienced hard times. He would think about his elderly relatives talking about eating soup that they’d wrung from the sweat of their handkerchiefs or the pro bono clients he’d once represented to meet the firm’s requirement that its attorneys “give back,” and he’d wonder if he had the resourcefulness to get by the way some of his clients did. Those that had made it through the Panic had probably been a lot better equipped to handle the aftermath than people who lived in four-thousand-square-foot homes and drove Range Rovers.
Before the Panic, Ben had never gone to war, had never seen a man die. He’d never lived in poverty or gone to bed with an empty stomach. He’d never been deprived the basic necessities, and although he knew it was a combination of hard work and luck, the good fortune of having been born in the U.S. in the late twentieth century, to parents who worked hard and had good jobs, of having worked hard himself to get through college and law school, he had once felt guilty that he’d never truly had to find out if he had the goods to survive when all those things were stripped away. He didn’t feel that way anymore.
Now he wished he could go back and slap the shit out of his pre-Panic self. No more guilt over not having suffered in the first part of his life, he’d given at the office, thanks. Suffering sucked. That’s why they called it suffering!
“It’s been a while,” he said. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Look, I remember my first night here,” Luke said. “On your own all that time, feeling all alone, that you’re just this big sack of nothing, feeling like the monster that everyone thinks you are. And then all of a sudden, someone’s offering you a warm bed, a roof over your head, and it all seems like someone’s gonna slip you a roofie.”
Ben nodded.
“Relax,” Luke said. “That’s all behind you.”
7
Ben woke up with a start, awash in the feeling that something was amiss, out of place. The coolness of the sheets, the cushion of the pillow, the feeling of warmth that spread through him like a good shot of whisky. Things that had grown harder to recall as time had gone by, like the fading signal from an AM radio station as you cruised down the interstate on a hot summer night. He felt refreshed, cleaned out. He sat up and stretched, still wearing the clothes he’d arrived in. He checked his watch and was stunned to see that it was nearly three in the afternoon. As he stared at the digital readout, the events of the previous night swirled back into focus. Luke, the Haven, the promise of the motive underlying his invite to this place.
They hadn’t lingered upon their arrival at the house. The downstairs was quiet but peaceful, the air cool and redolent with a hint of garlic or oregano, like someone had been at work on a hearty tomato sauce. Luke commented that Ben looked dead on his feet, and this was something that he couldn’t disagree with. They led him to a small guest room on the third floor and told him they’d see him in the morning. Ben had locked the door behind them; it gave him a small measure of security, whether imagined or not remained to be seen. He’d planned to explore his new environs but just wanted to sit down for a second, just one minute on that comfy-looking bed and before he knew it, he was out, buried by the sandman.
The bed was small, a twin, but comfortable. Crisp sheets with a high thread count, a down comforter, a soft pillow under his head. The rest of the room followed the same design - minimalist but top of the line all the way. Someone had spent a lot of time decorating it and maintaining it. It seemed to be a theme common throughout the house, that this place was immune to the way the world was now.
