A Time of Torment

  ‘Look,’ said Marius. He pointed to the undergrowth, where two shoes lay discarded. One of the women was now barefoot. It wouldn’t make any difference. They couldn’t be moving fast, either with shoes or without. The two men must be almost on top of them.

  ‘We’re coming!’ shouted Lucius. ‘You hear me? We’re coming!’

  And he raised his face to the sky and howled.

  Odell was leading the women back to the road. The older one – who said her name was Paige, the younger one was Gayle – told him that the Cut had been holding them prisoner, but they’d escaped, and Odell had no reason to doubt the truth of this. He’d take them back to his home, and then his momma and grandma would know what to do. For now, Odell’s attention was fixed on finding his way to the road. It was still murky, although there was light to the east, but Odell had good eyes, and because Perry had made him follow a rough, less trodden path, he could pick out the places through which they’d passed by the broken bushes and flattened undergrowth. He also kept the trail to his right, because it had been mostly to his left when they’d entered the Cut. He tried to explain to the women how important it was that they follow his footsteps as closely as possible, because traps had been laid by the Cut, but he wasn’t sure that they understood. They kept forcing the pace, and once he’d caught them walking almost alongside him, and had to warn them to stay behind. It was hard for them, though. Paige’s feet were all cut up, and Odell couldn’t be certain, and was too embarrassed to point it out, but he thought she might be bleeding from under her dress.

  A man’s voice came from very close behind them, followed by a howl.

  ‘We have to go faster!’ said Paige, and Odell saw a peculiar expression sweep across Gayle’s face, like the tide rolling in over a beach and erasing any sign that people might have passed that way – writing, footprints, sandcastles – leaving only blankness behind. She released her hold on Paige and stepped to her right, but the bank wasn’t level and she slid down a couple of feet on wet leaves and dirt. Gayle was trying to drag herself back up again, and Odell was reaching over to help her, when he heard a snapping sound and Gayle screamed in pain and lost her footing entirely. Odell glimpsed a thin line of silver wrapped around her left leg, just above the ankle. Gayle tried to get up, and the wire of the snare rose out of the leaves, stretching taut from the tree trunk to which it was anchored.

  Odell turned to Paige, but Paige was gone, and then a hand clasped itself over Odell’s mouth as he was yanked from his feet and carried into the trees.

  87

  Lucius was the first to find her, Marius trailing behind. Gayle was sitting amid a pile of wet leaves, scratching with her nails at the snare around her leg. She stared up at Lucius even as her nails continued to work, tearing at her own limb, digging through the skin and into the flesh. If she’d been left alone, Lucius thought she might even have tried to gnaw her leg off, like a trapped wolf.

  Lucius drew his knife and let her see the blade.

  ‘Go after the other one,’ he told Marius.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘I’ll take care of her.’

  ‘You can’t hurt her,’ said Marius. ‘Father warned us.’

  Father warned us. Fuck that.

  ‘He told us not to kill her,’ Lucius corrected him. ‘He never said anything about not hurting her. You just worry about the other bitch. Go on, now. I don’t want no audience for what I’m about to do.’

  Odell had stopped struggling. The hand over his mouth was black, just like the face beside his, and the voice in his ear that told him to be quiet, that they were on his side, except Odell didn’t have a side, or not one he knew about. And who were ‘they’ anyway? He saw two other men, both armed, hiding behind trees, and a third who was lying flat on the ground, his hands tied behind his back, a gag over his mouth, and a length of barbed wire around his neck. The rest of the barbed wire was connected to what looked like a broom handle, creating an instrument of control, the way someone cruel might force a bear to perform tricks. Odell couldn’t see the man’s face properly, but he thought he recognized him as Benedict, one of those from the Cut who’d been present when the hooded man was led into the woods.

  A shape appeared on a small rise, and Odell identified another of the Cut. He had a gun in his right hand. He progressed warily along the trail, watching his feet, the woods, even the branches above his head, as though what he sought might be lurking up there like a bat or a bird.

  ‘Come on out, now,’ said Marius. ‘It’ll just go worse for you the longer this goes on.’

  He stopped, his attention caught by a mark on the ground before him. He knelt, and put his fingers to fresh blood. He raised it before his face and smeared it with his thumb. It was still warm.

  When he looked up again, a man stood on the path before him. He was small and unshaven, and wore a knit cap against the cold. Like Marius, he also held a gun in his hand.

  ‘Keep quiet,’ he said, ‘and let the gun drop.’

  A more experienced thug than Marius might have done as he was ordered, recognizing the futility of trying to bring up a weapon to counter another who already had a gun leveled at him. He might even have decided that it was better not to move at all.

  But Marius panicked. He tried to stand. He wasn’t even sure that he intended to use the gun. He’d never shot anyone before, and now he never would, for Angel killed him as soon as his knees left the ground.

  Lucius was standing over Gayle, his belt already unbuckled, when the shot came.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  He refastened his belt and backed away from Gayle. He called his brother’s name, but received no reply. Maybe Paige had tried to jump him, and he’d fired off a shot to scare her. He’d better not have injured her enough to harm the baby. That child she was carrying was pure gold to them.

  Lucius was halfway up the bank, his gun in his hand, when he saw a pair of sneakers before him, one of them bloody. His gaze moved up from the sneakers to the neatly pressed pants, past the clean shirt, and finally to the placid, smiling face of Perry Lutter.

  ‘I told you I’d see you again,’ said Perry, except it wasn’t Perry’s voice that came out of his mouth, but a deeper male voice, a black voice. Then Perry wasn’t there anymore, and in his place stood a man with a shaved head and a silver circle of beard, the mocking, dangerous presence from the bar in Portland, the one, according to the survivors, who’d started all the shooting back at Dryden’s Inn.

  Lucius let the gun drop and raised his hands.

  ‘I give up,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Louis, and he sent Lucius to join his brother in the fires of the next world.

  Henkel, meanwhile, was engaged with the fires of this world, in his case the remnants of one wing of Dryden’s Inn that was crumbling to charred wood and ash as two fire trucks struggled to ensure that the blaze didn’t spread to the rest of the building. They were aided in this by an easterly breeze that was blowing the sparks and flames away from the motel complex and toward a disused lot that had once housed a bar named Whitney’s, which everyone in Plassey County knew as Whitey’s due to its famed lack of tolerance for non-Caucasian customers. Whitney’s particular brand of Jim Crow nostalgia had come to an end in 1997, when members of an African American gang named the L8 took a detour while transporting two thousand stamp bags of heroin from Pittsburgh to Weirton in a pair of jitneys, and reduced Whitney’s to broken glass and splinters using an IED made from ammonium nitrate.

  Morton Dryden claimed not to have known what had happened in the course of a night that apparently encompassed a full-on battle at his inn, and the subsequent incineration of a quarter of his rooms, he and his desk clerk having conveniently been elsewhere at the time. Henkel didn’t much care what Dryden knew or didn’t know, and was only sorry that the wind seemed intent on not burning down the rest of his shithole establishment. What Henkel knew was that Charlie Parker had been staying at Dryden’s, and witnesses confirmed he had left
the scene, with two or three other men, in pursuit of one of the vehicles involved in the attack. Two more remained in the parking lot, but had deliberately been set on fire in an effort to hamper identification.

  Henkel didn’t need papers or plates to know it was the Cut that had come after Parker, and messed up the job, just as they had sent Nestor to kill him, and screwed that one up, too. Irene Colter was in a cell back at the sheriff’s building, guarded by two armed deputies. Since her arrest, she had only spoken to ask for her phone call, which she’d used to contact a lawyer named Daniel Starcher in Lewisburg, a man with links to the Cut.

  The state police, summoned by Henkel, were on their way, accompanied by at least one armored Humvee and the McDowell County MRAP, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle acquired under the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program, which was basically a way for the government to sell off some of its heavy armor now that Afghanistan and Iraq had been saved by regime change and democratization. At the time, Henkel thought the purchase of the MRAP was just about the dumbest thing he’d ever heard, given that the chances of anyone in McDowell County utilizing mines in a dispute were slim to none. Now, though, he wasn’t about to ride into the Cut without as much armor and firepower as he could find, and the MRAP was starting to look like a pretty good purchase, all things considered.

  His cell phone rang. He looked at the number, but didn’t recognize it.

  ‘Henkel,’ he said.

  ‘It’s Parker.’

  Henkel took the phone from his ear and held it toward the fire, just in time for it to catch the crash of three rooms collapsing in on themselves.

  ‘You hear that?’ he said. ‘That’s the sound of a building burning down. Where the hell are you? Wherever you are, you’re under arrest.’

  ‘I’m at the home of a woman named Teona Watson,’ Parker replied. ‘She says you know where she lives. I have two pregnant women here who’ve been held prisoner and repeatedly raped by the Cut.’

  88

  Cassander had heard the gunshots. They were faint, but boded ill. He’d warned his sons not to harm the women. If they were shooting, then it wasn’t at the escapees. He sent two men to investigate. They came back as soon as they found the bodies. Cassander shed no tears. There was no time. He would weep later, if he lived.

  On Cassander’s orders, the Cut was preparing to fight. Men and women were equipping themselves with shotguns and semi-automatic weapons. Vehicles were being moved onto the roads, each of them loaded with sacks of cement, bags of fertilizer, anything to add weight before the tires were punctured and the engines crippled. Once the roads were blocked, Cassander’s instructions were for the majority of the inhabitants to retreat to the Square, where the Cut would make its stand.

  But they would not be many: just over thirty adults at most. The Cut had been surviving on its reputation, coasting on fumes. Perhaps Oberon was right after all, and its time was coming to an end. If so, it would not be a slow decay, but a final great conflagration, and the Dead King would be part of it.

  The Cut had been forced to hide the Dead King only twice in its history, when it had believed itself to be under imminent threat. A bunker in the woods had been constructed especially for that purpose, but Cassander no longer intended to utilize it. He had spread gasoline in and around the blockhouse, and would position himself there. When the end came, he would lock himself inside, set the fire, and die with the Dead King.

  Nikolas, one of Micah Morcamb’s sons, came to Cassander as he was tossing the last of the gasoline cans into the woods. Nikolas looked frightened. He had good cause to be. Most of them would not survive what was coming.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Cassander.

  ‘The Holberts have fled,’ said Nikolas. ‘The Lunns too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Their trucks are gone. They’ve left us.’

  The Holberts had three sons, the youngest seventeen. The Lunns had two, both in their twenties. It meant Cassander’s force had been cut by almost a third in a single stroke.

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Just me and Damon, so far.’ Damon was Nikolas’s younger brother.

  Cassander grabbed Nikolas by the right shoulder.

  ‘You keep this to yourself, you hear?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Nikolas had an AR-15 on his shoulder. He was small for his age, and the gun looked far too big for him.

  ‘You know how to use that weapon?’ asked Cassander.

  ‘My daddy taught me,’ said Nikolas.

  ‘Good. When they come, they won’t care who they hurt. You saw what they did in Waco. Women, children – everybody died. It was all the same to the government. We have to hold them off for as long as we can, make them negotiate with us. We can’t just let them roll in here, understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re a good boy. Now go join your father and brother.’

  Nikolas left him and walked out of the woods, the rifle bouncing against his back, and a voice spoke Cassander’s name. He turned to find the source, but no one was near. He listened and heard his name being called again.

  This time he knew.

  He returned to the blockhouse, and stood before the Dead King.

  At the Watson home, Henkel, with Rob Channer beside him, listened to Paige Dunstan recount the essential details of the women’s story. He didn’t have time to hear it all, and he didn’t need to. He already wanted to kill someone.

  Parker leaned against the wall of the living room. Across from him sat two other men, whom Parker had introduced to Henkel as Angel and Louis. The one named Angel made Henkel want to hide his wallet. Louis stone-cold scared the shit out of him. They’d been forced to kill two of the Cut in self-defence getting the women out, Parker said, and Paige had confirmed his story, identifying the dead men as Lucius and Marius, Cassander’s sons. The tale might even have been true. Henkel added it to the list of things that he didn’t care much about either way. It was growing at a frightening speed.

  Benedict, Zachary Bowman’s son, was bound with barbed wire to the Watsons’ wooden gate, a piece of broom handle still attached to the back of his neck. Parker had used him to enter the Cut, relying on Benedict’s instinct for self-preservation to avoid any traps. Benedict didn’t say a whole lot when Henkel removed the gag from his mouth, beyond babbling about kidnapping and murder, so Henkel had simply gagged him again.

  ‘So what now?’ asked Parker.

  Henkel told him about the arrival of additional firepower in the form of state troopers and armored vehicles. He’d have called in the National Guard too, if he thought it might have helped. Henkel was royally pissed off, and his blood was up: the town’s only inn was on fire, most of the men in the room with him had recently been involved in a gunfight on his territory, the Cut had been raping women and doing God alone knew what with the resultant babies, and his girlfriend had just tried to have him killed. It was hard to see how the day could get much worse, but Parker found a way.

  ‘What will the Cut do when all those guns start appearing on their land?’ he asked.

  ‘They’ll fight,’ said Henkel.

  ‘There are women and children in there.’

  ‘Some of them will fight, too.’

  ‘Then you’ll have a bloodbath on your hands.’

  That wasn’t what Henkel wanted to hear, but he knew it might be true. He’d been so concerned about dealing with the Cut once and for all that he hadn’t fully considered the consequences.

  ‘What’s the alternative?’ he asked.

  ‘You hold off on the state troopers, and the armored vehicles, and we go back in. Maybe Oberon can be reasoned with. He won’t want to see his people killed.’

  ‘He and his “people” are looking at federal charges on the kidnappings,’ said Henkel, ‘or worse if we find evidence of capital crimes.’

  ‘Not in this state,’ said Channer.

  West Virginia had abolished the death penalty back in 1965, and the last federa
l capital trials in 2007 had resulted in the overturning of death penalties in favor of sentences of life without parole and thirty-five years respectively. With good lawyers, anyone in the Cut accused of capital crimes would be almost guaranteed to avoid the federal needle. It was a bargaining tool.

  ‘You may have a point,’ Henkel conceded. ‘There’s just one problem: who’s to say that Oberon is still in charge in there? He may be a son of a bitch, but he cares about those families. Even if he was responsible for the attacks on both of us, he’d know by now that his best option was negotiation. He’d have called and tried to open a channel of communication. It’s his way.’

  ‘If Oberon isn’t holding the reins,’ said Parker, ‘then who is?’

  Henkel sighed.

  ‘Cassander Hobb,’ he replied. ‘And you and your friends just killed his boys.’

  89

  Fallen trees, heavy furniture, and sandbags were being used to create fortified positions around the Square. Most of the women and older men, and all of the young children, had been moved to the prison house formerly occupied by Paige and Gayle. They had no weapons, and in the event of the Cut falling they were under instructions to surrender to the authorities. There was no sign of Cassander, but Cassia and Jana, two of the younger women with infant sons, had gone to the blockhouse to beg him to reconsider, and send someone to negotiate with law enforcement before they entered the Cut. They were kept back by Koli and Logmar, two Cassander loyalists, who told them that Cassander was seeking guidance.

  And so they waited, but Cassander did not emerge.

  Henkel made some calls. The first of the state troopers had arrived at the sheriff’s office, and more were on their way. According to Lucy, the FBI had also made contact, and two of its agents were anxious to speak with the sheriff. They seemed very concerned about Parker, which didn’t surprise Henkel, even if he wasn’t sure how they’d found out that he was in Plassey County. Pretty soon, Henkel knew, the whole business would be out of his hands. The FBI, if – or when – it became formally involved, would have professional negotiators, but Henkel thought that local knowledge of the Cut might best avail. He didn’t want a slaughter: he wanted surrender. He just hoped that it might still be Oberon from whom he would be trying to secure it.