Chapter Five
“So what’s going on with all this?” Nick asked, motioning with his head toward the room where Persephone stayed. “What are we supposed to be doing with her?”
“Fuck if I know,” Ponytail said with a grunt of disgust. “Clayton told us she was going to help us get the word out about what we’re doing, but as far as I can tell, all she’s done is sit in that room. I mean, why aren’t we making videos of her so her daddy can put them all over his TV stations? That would get their attention.”
Nick knew Clayton was the leader of the militia. Clayton Burger, a low level thief who had convinced this band of miscreants that all their lives were missing was the chance to show the man that they wouldn’t take being ignored anymore.
He hadn’t seen him since he’d been brought to the house earlier that day, but he wondered if he knew how restless his troops were becoming. Hunting zombies on TV wasn’t what these guys craved. They wanted real life conflict with the world they’d decided had turned against them.
That Ponytail wanted to make some videos of Persephone, likely with a gun held to her head just for good measure, smacked of something terrorist groups did, but in reality, that’s exactly what these guys were. They hadn’t had much success yet at being that, but it didn’t mean that wasn’t what they wanted to be.
He dreaded the moment when one or more of them would pull their heads out of their asses and figure out that sitting around some rundown house in rural Virginia wasn’t the way to get the world’s attention to your cause. When that happened, he feared they might figure out that holding a hostage is useful, but killing a hostage got you way more press.
Exactly what these assholes wanted.
“Maybe Clayton’s got other plans,” Nick suggested, unsure how Ponytail would take that idea.
But he seemed resigned to just that and shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know. All I know is that this isn’t what I wanted to do with my damn time. If we’re going to show the world what happens when you forget the most important people in society, then let’s fucking show them. We’ve got a hostage. Let’s show them what we can do to her!”
Forcing himself to nod, Nick inwardly recoiled in horror at the thought of what Ponytail and his buddies dreamed of doing to Persephone. Left to their own devices for long enough, he had no doubt they’d kill her, but he had a sick feeling that first they’d take out their resentment on her for everything they mistakenly believed society had done to them.
He couldn’t let them do that.
“So we’re just supposed to sit around twiddling our thumbs here?” he asked in a tone of phony disgust.
Ponytail nodded. “Yeah, it sucks, doesn’t it? Maybe a few of us could make a beer run. There’s got to be someplace around that has some. At least being drunk would be better than nothing. Clayton put a stop to smoking, so all we can do now is those fucking pills he lets us have.”
“Pills? What kind? Oxy?” Nick asked with an eagerness he didn’t have to force. If he was going to be dealing with that kind of shit, he needed to know right then and there.
His question made Ponytail laugh loudly and throw his head back. “I fucking wish! I would kill for Oxy right now. No, Clayton says the pills he got are better, but as far as I can tell, they’re nothing, man. They just relax you. Like that’s what I want now stuck out here in the hinterlands of wherever the hell this place is.”
Nick quietly sighed as relief washed over him. Clayton had probably just given the guys downers to keep them from spinning out of control. Considering all the energy drinks they had consumed just in the time he’d been at the house, he didn’t doubt the leader’s decision. That combined with the fact that none of them seemed very stable added up to the real possibility that without something to calm them down, they might become uncontrollable at any time.
“So, when is Clayton coming here? He doesn’t expect us to just sit around and do nothing for days on end, does he?”
Ponytail shrugged once again and answered, “Who knows? He told Drist he had something else planned for a few days from now, so I guess until then, we’re stuck here.”
Nick wondered what the leader planned to do as he mumbled, “Some revolution.”
“At least we’re moving tonight,” Ponytail said with a smile that showed off his crooked teeth. “Well, that’s what I hear anyway. I just hope we get somewhere closer to where real people live. All I’ve seen in the past week is cows eating grass and fucking farmers.”
So they planned to move to another location that night. That would mean they’d be moving Persephone too. Nick needed to get assigned to that job to make sure they didn’t hurt her.
The problem was he had no idea who actually made those decisions. The group of men didn’t act like any organization he’d ever infiltrated before. They had no leader present most of the time, and he had no clue who chose who for what job. All he knew was when he showed up Drist had told him he had to feed Persephone, but that was only because he didn’t want to do it anymore.
“So, when Clayton isn’t around, who’s the boss here?” Nick asked as Ponytail walked toward him to leave the room.
He stopped and thought for a moment before he answered, “I don’t know. I guess Drist, but that’s only because he threatens to kill anyone who pisses him off. But don’t worry. Just stay on his good side and you’ll be fine.”
How he’d be didn’t worry him so much as how Persephone would be under the control of that bastard. His need to constantly wave that damn weapon around made him unpredictable, to say the least.
But if cozying up to that madman was the way to make sure she stayed safe, then that’s what he had to do. He just hoped Ponytail was right about Drist being the one who would make the decisions.
By early afternoon, boredom or Clayton’s special pills had overtaken every guy in the house but Drist, so Nick took his chance to get friendly with him and hopefully ensure he could protect Persephone from that point on. He walked outside to find him sitting in the hot midday sun on the back steps that led from the kitchen to the large backyard he guessed went back for at least an acre or so.
As usual, the man had his gun in his hand. Before that moment, Nick hadn’t paid much attention to what kind of gun it was. That he pointed it at people all the time had been bad enough.
But now he saw Drist’s favorite accessory was a Glock .45. Nothing terribly unique or special, it would certainly do the job when he pulled the trigger.
Nick stared down at him for a moment as he stroked his fingers slowly along the barrel. Jesus, this guy had some love for that gun.
“Hey, man. What’s up? Everyone in there is crashed in the middle of the day,” he said from the top of the stairs to Drist who sat on the second to last step closest to the sidewalk.
He turned his head and looked up at Nick as he continued to run his fingers over the Glock. “Pussies. Why aren’t you in there too?”
“Video games don’t do a whole lot for me most days,” he said, avoiding the truth that the guys inside were so doped up that they couldn’t help but sleep in the middle of the day.
Nodding his head, Drist made a clucking sound with his tongue. “Pussies.”
He was a man of few words, and at the moment, he seemed to like that singular word. The idea that he probably had never seen a pussy in his entire life, or if he had, it had been online on some cheap porn site made Nick want to chuckle, but he stifled his desire to laugh at Drist and got down to business.
Taking a seat next to him on the step, he leaned back on his elbows and stretched out his legs. The whole movement was meant to make him look relaxed, but he knew better than to let down his guard as he pretended to stare out at the backyard.
“I hear we get to leave this shithole tonight. Thank God for that, right?”
Drist closed one eye and aimed the gun at some unsuspecting squirrel about fifty yards away. “Hell, yeah. I’ll be happy to get the hell out of this farm shit. This man needs the city, for fuck’s sake.”
“Where are we going?”
The question sounded no more different than the last he asked, but Nick had the sense immediately that Drist heard something in it that bothered him. Turning toward him, he pointed his gun directly at his head and narrowed his eyes in suspicion.
“What’s it matter to you? You writing a book?” he asked, his words laced with barely restrained anger.
It took everything in his power to keep calm as he looked down the barrel of Drist’s gun aimed squarely between his eyes. His heart beating wildly, Nick shrugged and said casually, “No, man. I just don’t have a thing for farm animals, and that’s all this place seems to have. Did you see those heifers near the end of the backyard, for Christ’s sake? The fucking things just walk around this place like they own it.”
His longwinded explanation that diverted into the discussion of his dislike of cows nearby seemed to throw Drist off, and he turned to look around for the cow Nick had mentioned. He likely wanted to shoot the damn thing.
Pointing his gun back toward the yard, he laughed. “I could go for a steak. A big, fat, juicy steak, right?”
Nick forced himself to laugh, sure this guy wasn’t playing with a full deck. He had no doubt, though, that if he got the chance, he’d take a shot at the brown and white cow nearly a hundred yards away that now slowly walked away from the backyard.
Crazy fucker. Even animals knew to stay the fuck away from him.
“It’ll be nice to be somewhere we can get a steak and we don’t have to kill it ourselves, won’t it?” he asked, hoping to get Drist back onto the subject of where they were all moving to that night.
“Yeah. Clayton won’t be sending us anywhere good, though. We need to keep moving. A few more nights until he can join us.”
“So more houses like this?”
A rabbit about twenty yards away distracted Drist, so he didn’t answer for a long moment while he eyed up his shot. When he did, he said, “Yeah. One of Clayton’s friends is going to let us use his mother’s old house in Winchester. I guess the old broad died a few months ago, and he can’t find anyone to buy the place. See, that’s what this thing we’re doing is all about.”
Unsure what the hell he meant, Nick put on his most serious expression and nodded. “I get it, man.”
“A guy gets left a perfectly good house and the motherfucker won’t sell because fucking McMansions all over the place make the world think that every house has to have twenty bedrooms and fifteen fucking bathrooms. It’s ridiculous! That’s what this is all about. It’s time to take back this world and let guys like Clayton’s friend be able to sell his mother’s house for a decent profit. I mean, it’s got like three bedrooms. What’s the fucking problem with that?”
Drist began to unravel there in front of Nick, and he wondered if he should push him for any more details. The guy clearly had a very tenuous grasp on reality to begin with, and whatever the hell he was rambling on about concerning real estate already had upset him.
“I get it, man. Three bedrooms. Hell, I grew up in a two bedroom apartment, and we thought we had it pretty damn nice. We didn’t starve, and my father always made sure we had clothes to wear and a roof over our heads. Nowadays, he’d be seen as a loser, but that’s bullshit. Total bullshit. He was a good guy, my father.”
Nick watched as Drist nodded his head, eagerly agreeing with every word he’d said. In truth, his father had been a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army, and by the time he and his mother had him, they had more than enough money to afford one of those McMansions Drist railed against. He’d grown up in a house five times the size of the house behind them.
The world this crazy fucker hated was pretty much the world Nick had lived in since the day he was born. He wasn’t Marshall Gilmore level, but he certainly had never been Drist level.
But he knew how to talk a good game with people like him. They all pretty much had the same story in mind when they thought of themselves. Modest upbringing with decent folks who tried their best to give them a life better than theirs. It was overly romanticized usually, but it helped the Drists of the world think that despite all the good that had been around in the past, now none of it existed anymore because of people like Marshall Gilmore.
The truth was that good they looked back to still existed. They just wanted more. They wanted what the media moguls of the world had but they didn’t want to do what it took to get it.
Well, other than kidnap young women and threaten to upend the world order if they didn’t get their way.
He didn’t give a damn about Drist’s distorted belief system or any of their messed up ideas, in truth. He’d seen them all before. All he cared about was finding a way to get Persephone out from under their control before they killed her.
“That’s the way of the world these days,” Drist said angrily. “People like your old man are losers, while that bitch’s father gets to be king of the world. It’s wrong, man. All wrong. That’s why we have to change it before it gets too out of control and all the good this country has to offer is gone forever.”
Good like Drist. Yeah. Right.
“She’s never had to worry about the roof over her head or having enough money to get lunch at school,” Nick said with a sneer he added for effect. Pointing toward the room where Persephone sat, he added, “People like her don’t get it. They never will.”
Before Drist could get himself worked up into a lather, Nick stood up to leave. “I can’t talk about this anymore or I’m going to want to go in there and make her pay for all people like her and her father have done. I know Clayton wouldn’t want me to do that, though. Whatever else she is, she’s going to help us do what needs to be done to change this messed up fucking world.”
Drist nodded, grudgingly admitting Nick was right. “Yeah, Clayton would be pissed if we did anything to her. He wants to get more money from her father, so we can’t mess up her face.”
Pretending to be disappointed he couldn’t beat the hell out of a woman, Nick frowned and nodded his head. “I get it. This is a long game. We have to think a few moves ahead. It’s like chess.”
“Exactly! Chess is exactly what it’s like, and those rich bastards aren’t going to know what hit them when we start playing,” Drist said excitedly and then let out an evil laugh as he pointed his gun at Nick to reinforce his point.
As he walked away, Nick wondered if Drist even knew what chess was. He had a feeling he would be terribly disappointed when he found out it didn’t involve guns or zombies or killing anything.