Legion of Despair: Book Three in The Borrowed World Series (15 page)

Alice ended her search at Office 17. She opened the door and shined her light inside. On the desk were several unopened bottles of water, some crackers, and a few plastic lunch-sized tubs of Campbell’s soup. In a desk chair, a couple of fleece blankets were folded and stacked. On the desk blotter was a large scented candle in a jar. Beside it was a cigarette lighter and a note written on a sheet of copy paper.

GUESS YOU MISSED A CANDLE IN YOUR FIRE INSPECTIONS, ALICE. GOOD THING YOU DID.

She laughed for the first time in a long time. She closed the office door, locked it behind her, and propped her flashlight on the desk. She lit the candle and it threw a warm glow in the windowless office. She collapsed in the desk chair and felt like she could cry. The relief of simply being back in familiar territory was overwhelming. She thought of going to her own office, but it was on an outside wall and she did not want the glow of the candle drawing attention to her office window. She would stay here. She would eat and drink all that her exhaustion would allow her, then she could prop her feet up and sleep.

She would have a long walk tomorrow, but she hoped it would take her home to her family.

Chapter 11

Gary’s House

Richlands, VA

Gary loaded the car with his backpack and his radio. He had several AR and M4 variations that he’d bought over the years. He grabbed a Bushmaster from the gun safe.

“I’ve never seen that one before,” Will commented.

“It’s special,” Gary said. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

He had a half-dozen spare mags, a headlamp, and a few other pieces of gear, all of it concealed in his pack. The rifle itself would be hidden beneath a blanket in the passenger seat of the car, easily accessible if things went to shit. On his belt, carried open and accessible, Gary had his Glock with two spare mags. He had two more full magazines in a pouch on the outside of his pack.

His first stop was the home of Wesley Molloy, the young man he’d apprehended on his property the night before. It seemed a little farfetched, but he wanted to see if the punk still had his generator. He wasn’t sure if he would actually kill someone to get it back, but he wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t. It wasn’t like he could go out and buy another one.

The subdivision the Molloys lived in was one of the largest in the area. If you were a coal executive or a physician, but not rich enough to own an estate, this was where you lived. It was also where you lived if you had aspirations of wealth, just so you could claim you lived there. The neighborhood certainly had the largest homes in the little coal town. It wasn’t too far from Gary’s home and he reached the entrance after less than five minutes of driving. It was uneventful except for having to dodge a downed tree and a few abandoned vehicles that hadn’t been pulled from the roadway. With few cars moving, the Department of Transportation had no plans to keep the road clear.

Gary was surprised he was able to drive right into the subdivision. There was no guard, no blocked entrance, nothing. Had he lived here, he would have made some type of effort at trying to restrict entry into the neighborhood. Even a rudimentary gate made from a downed tree would send a message that people who didn’t belong there should keep moving. It said a lot about these people that they weren’t working together. Maybe all these people had left and abandoned their houses just like he was planning on doing with his.

Will had been able to tell him exactly where to find the house he was looking for. It was a house he’d noticed before, both due to its size and pretension, but he never knew who lived there. There were no other cars moving in the subdivision. Unlike when he visited town yesterday, he didn’t even feel like he was being watched here. Were they all gone? Dead? Or just apathetic and resigned to some dire fate? No children played and no one worked outside. He would not have been surprised to see a tumbleweed blow past. The place had that kind of feel.

The farther he got off the main road, the more expensive the houses appeared to be. They were larger, with more of the architectural features and high end materials that drove the price up. The vehicles in the driveways were more expensive too. In the end, however, a Hummer or Cadillac Escalade with no gas was no more useful than a Dodge Neon with no gas. A dead car was a dead car.

Gary turned into what he thought was the Molloys’ driveway and parked behind a half-dozen vehicles. There was a Mercedes SUV, a Mini Cooper, and a Lexus. There was a BMW with all kinds of knick-knacks hanging from the rearview mirror. One of them was a graduation tassel. There was a customized Honda with low-profile tires on expensive wheels and an aftermarket exhaust. Gary assumed this belonged to the boy he’d dealt with last night. It seemed like just the kind of vehicle he would drive.

Past the vehicles, Gary approached the four-car garage. The house was an enormous brick monstrosity devoid of style. It was built for size more than anything else. One look at the sealed black asphalt of the driveway told Gary that several dirt bikes and ATVs with muddy tires had been using this garage. To his right was a sidewalk that led to a covered entry. Gary followed the sidewalk beneath several windows but saw no movement in those windows. He walked between two brick columns with iron horse heads upon them, climbed six cast limestone steps, and paused on the porch.

He listened carefully, hearing no steps, no voices, not even a shotgun racking a shell into the chamber. That he could hear nothing inside the house was not entirely surprising. A newer brick house with proper insulation could mask a lot of noise, including that of cocking weapons. He thought it best to maintain vigilance. He took a step and stopped in front of the door. It had looked like wood from a distance but he could now see that it was fiberglass. He knocked on the door, then stepped to the side. He hoped that someone firing through the door would not be able to hit him this way.

No one came. No one fired.

He knocked again and put his ear to the door. It made him nervous to do that, but he was determined to find his generator. Still, he could hear nothing inside the house. To one side of the door was a sidelight, a tall, narrow pane of glass that allowed natural light into the entry of the home. Gary approached the sidelight, boldly pressed his face against it, and cupped his eyes. With the design of the house, he could see straight through it to the backyard. There was a foyer, and beyond that a great room with an enormous glass wall that looked out onto a wide deck.

Gary knocked again, conscious that he didn’t belong in this neighborhood and his knocking could be drawing attention. There were several houses that had a clear of line of fire to his position. Someone could shoot at him thinking he was a thief or a looter. Someone could attack him for his car or the fuel in the tank.

He went back to the sidelight and stared through again. It almost looked like there were people sitting on the couch in the great room watching television, but Gary couldn’t tell for sure. It was always hard to look from a sunny location into the darkened interior of a house, even with your eyes shaded. He could just as easily been looking at a stack of puffy sofa pillows.

Wondering if he might be able to see better with binoculars, Gary went back to his vehicle and retrieved a cheap set from his pack. Back at the door, Gary knocked one more time before moving back to the sidelight and pressing the binoculars against the glass. The field of view was so narrow that only a small section of the room was visible through the lenses. He had to angle them in different directions all over the room before orienting himself and finding the shapes on the sofa. When he did, he jerked violently backward and gasped as his view was filled with the bloated face of a dead woman, her head misshapen and nearly obscured by a cloud of flies.

Recovering from the shock, Gary put the binoculars back to his eyes and saw that she was sitting beside another corpse, that of a man, presumably her husband. The man’s face was also deformed both through bloating and through the possible gunshot wound that took a chunk of his forehead out. His face was also crusted with a thick mass of flies. In his lap, Gary could see a large revolver, the trigger finger still loosely threaded through the trigger guard, where it had likely fallen after the fatal shot.

They had killed themselves. At least the man had killed himself. Maybe he had killed his wife or maybe she had killed herself too. He wondered why. One thing about the current situation of the world was that it shook up the social strata. People who had valuable skills in the old world might not find themselves so valuable when the rules changed. Perhaps they couldn’t stand the idea that they were just going to be like everyone else, struggling for food, fuel, and resources just to stay alive.

Gary decided that he had no interest in going inside. He wasn’t sure that his generator was even in there, and if it was, they could have it. He had better things to do than risk his life in that stinking house.

*

Gary lived eight miles from his office and it normally took him ten to fifteen minutes to get there, as long as he didn’t get behind a school bus. The first half of the trip was on a winding two-lane mountain road. The last half was on a four-lane highway. The two-lane road didn’t have any shoulders for vehicles to pull off on if they ran out of fuel, so drivers had coasted as far as they could get, then abandoned their vehicles where they sat. In some places, it created traffic jams that had been difficult to get around. One had been impassible until Gary released the emergency brakes on several vehicles, put them in neutral, and let them roll over an embankment. The only houses in sight had shown no signs of life so Gary hoped that he didn’t draw any undue attention from his actions. In better times, vehicles crashing over hillsides drew a crowd.

The truck he hoped to return in was bigger than the Nissan he was driving now. If he didn’t create a return lane of sufficient size, he had no hope of getting back. It was still early in the day and he hoped that there wouldn’t be many people out walking or stirring about. He didn’t want to have any confrontations or have to turn down any hitchhikers needing rides. He just wanted a smooth day for a change. He couldn’t remember the last one he’d had. That was kind of funny when he thought about it. Most of his life had been fairly uneventful, even boring at times. Now, he’d give anything for a boring day.

When he reached the four-lane road, he was pleased to find it clear. There were vehicles on the side of the road that appeared to have run out of fuel and many of them showed signs of impact. He knew that both the state police and the National Guard had vehicles capable of clearing highways under these circumstances. It looked like such a vehicle, or a piece of heavy construction equipment, had been used to clear the road.

This section of highway was relatively unpopulated, and he saw absolutely no one for the remainder of his drive. When he turned off the main road and onto the campus of his employer, he was shocked by the condition of the buildings. All of them appeared to have suffered damage. The oldest building, a single-story clinic, had windows broken out and showed signs of looting. He wasn’t surprised since that building had stored medications. Gary also thought that he may have seen a body lying near the building but he didn’t investigate. Bodies were becoming a common sight and he didn’t want to see any more dead people than he’d already seen.

The maintenance shop was at the rear of the ten-acre complex. As Gary drove by the two-story administration building that had housed his office, he had a thought. Prior to leaving on his ill-fated trip, he had ordered some ammunition from an online retailer. He was planning on taking a tactical shooting class and there was a requirement to bring one thousand rounds of your preferred caliber. Gary had ordered one thousand rounds of target quality ammo for his .40 caliber Glock.

The box was supposed to arrive the day he left. When he got a package at work, someone usually took it up to his office and left it outside the door. If they did, he might have a thousand rounds of very useful ammunition sitting up there waiting for him. It all depended on whether the ammo had arrived on time, if someone delivered it up to his office, and if no looter or vandal had beat him to it.

He parked his car on the far side of the building out of the view of anyone who might be passing by. He pulled the headlamp from his pack, strapped it on, and slung the pack over his shoulders. He probably didn’t need it, but he didn’t want to leave it there to tempt someone to break into the car. Staring at his blanket-covered AR rifle, he realized that its camouflage was pretty inadequate, so he took it as well. Not knowing how he was going to carry the ammo with all this crap on him, he locked the car and headed for the front door.

It turned out that Gary didn’t need his keys for the front door. The full-length glass had been shattered and he merely stepped through the aluminum frame, his feet crunching on the pellets of tempered glass that littered the carpeted entry. The noise was loud in the quiet building and Gary suddenly felt very vulnerable. He switched on his headlamp and took a look around. Not only was the building vandalized, it looked like people had been hanging around in there. There were food wrappers, empty bottles, and what looked like used toilet paper. There was a charred section of carpet that looked as if someone may even have tried to build a campfire or cooking fire in the middle of the lobby.

Around the corner to the left was the area where packages were usually dropped off by UPS or FedEx. Of course there was nothing there. Anything that had been there had most certainly been stolen by this time. Gary turned around and headed deeper into the interior of the building, hoping the steel security had not been breached.

The back hallways received very little natural light. There were no windows onto the hallway itself and the only light came in through open offices. Several office doors were open, probably not locked to begin with. Other wooden office doors showed signs of attempted entry, the wood veneer surfaces scarred and splintered. There were office chairs in the hallway, as well as smashed computers. In one office, a torso dummy used to teach CPR was propped up in an office chair, wearing lipstick and holding a phone receiver to his ear. Reams of copy paper were opened and scattered, carpeting the debris-filled floor. A bathroom door was wedged open and Gary shined his light inside. All the sinks had been smashed and the doors torn from the toilet stalls. Someone had expended a lot of energy wrecking the building.

Thankfully, the steel door leading to the stairwell was battered but not breached. Scratches around the jamb indicated that someone may have tried to get an instrument in there to pry it open, but had not succeeded. Gary slung his rifle over his shoulder, hoping that the cluttered floor would give him ample warning if someone approached him from behind while he was digging for his keys.