“Will he help us? We can use someone on the inside of the security forces.”
“You want to get him arrested?” Bellman looked him over. “This is a dangerous game, Kelly. Assuming that’s even your name.”
“Freedom’s a dangerous business. If you people want to go on like this, you can.”
“We don’t.”
“Then find some people you can trust and let’s get together. Stay off the phones.”
“I may be a country preacher, but I’m not that dumb,” replied Bellman, irritated.
“I’m used to operating in enemy territory. You aren’t. And this is now enemy territory for you. If you do this, if you defy the PR, they will come down on you. You saw what happened to those people at that farm.”
“The Langers were nuts with guns.”
“They killed the Langers because the Langers defied them, not because they were nuts with guns. The whole PSF is nuts with guns. If you choose to defy them too, there’s no limit to what they’ll do to you. You have to understand that.”
“We can’t keep living like this.”
“No, you can’t. I just want to make sure you are going in to this with your eyes open.”
“They’re open,” Bellman said firmly, but Turnbull wasn’t sure he believed him.
Turnbull slept in a small caretaker’s room in the back of the church. Bellman went off to contact the key folks he needed for the face-to-face meeting; he would stay the night at his parsonage a few blocks away. There was a small television set and Turnbull tried to watch the news. There was a summer shower coming, which the determinedly ugly weathercaster of unspecified gender attributed to the United States’ “racist climate crimes.”
Turnbull flipped the set off. His .45 sat on the bedside table. He read for a while, though all he had was his paperback copy of The Runewench of Zorgon, and the fact he had not read the prior eleven books meant that Part XII was utterly incoherent. He still had no idea what the “Elf-Blade of Norxim” was, but apparently it was a sword that talked because it gave a seven page libertarian-themed speech that sounded like something Ayn Rand would have written if she had dated J.R.R. Tolkien.
He tossed the book at the wastebasket and missed. It was quiet; he settled back on his pillow listened for a while. Satisfied that it was safe, he allowed himself to fall asleep. He dreamed that he was short of ammo, and he tossed and turned.
The center of town was already largely cleaned up. The damaged Ford truck was gone, and the broken glass from its windshield and several of the plate glass windows the PVs had shattered the previous night had been swept from the street and the sidewalks. But the people were on edge, walking faster than usual, and fear hung like sullen fog. It reminded Turnbull of some of the dictatorships he had operated in, and then it came to him that this should be no surprise. It saddened him that he felt the same oppressive gloom in his own homeland.
Or, at least, what had been his homeland until four years ago.
Turnbull had spent the day in the church thinking about the meeting and cleaning his .45. When Bellman came to get him at about five, he had put the weapon in its holster in the small of his back. Bellman saw it, but said nothing.
The meeting would be at the Sunrise Diner.
“It’s a nice little place right there on Main Street,” Bellman said.
Turnbull smiled. “Main Street.” That was almost too on the nose. But then the town had been founded and its roads laid out long before the discovery of irony.
Turnbull had originally been leery of meeting in a public place, but Bellman assured him that unless he wanted word of a secret rendezvous to get out they had best do everything above board. Everyone already knew there was a stranger in town; if he started having secret meetings that would certainly get around, and there were informers. So better to do it in plain sight.
They took Bellman’s Ford Taurus and kept to side streets most of the way. The pastor pulled into a small parking lot behind the row of storefronts. Turnbull surveyed the area without thinking about it – clear. He stepped out and onto the pavement.
Something growled at him.
A small brown puppy, some mix of terrier and spaniel and who knows what else, was blocking his path, snarling, with something in its mouth. It looked like a flattened frog.
“You don’t have a lot of rabies around here, do you?” Turnbull asked.
“A lot of dogs went feral when the government decided you needed a license for an ‘animal companion.’ Of course, the animal control people rarely do anything since they know they can’t be fired. It’s sad.”
The dog growled again, his dead toy quivering in his jaw.
“I think he wants to play fetch,” Turnbull said. “Go away, dog.” He stepped around the puppy, and they began walking. The puppy trotted behind them, proudly carrying his squashed amphibian prize.
They walked around to the front, Bellman greeting various townspeople on the way, but never introducing the large stranger with him. And in the current environment, no one asked.
The small, cozy Sunrise Diner was only partially full with the early dinner rush – “rush” being a relative term. Turnbull assessed the space quickly – plate glass frontage, one door in the front, a corridor heading rearward, probably to the restrooms and the kitchen. There would be an exit back there somewhere.
A pretty girl in her twenties dropped off a couple of plates of thin sandwiches; their French fry servings were pretty skimpy. The waitress was red-eyed, and Bellman stopped beside her on the way to the back.
“Are you all right, Becky?” he asked. She nodded. Bellman hugged her. Turnbull stood uncomfortably, unsure exactly what to do. She looked the stranger over, but said nothing. The pair moved on.
Bellman had arranged for a table in the rear. The table was already populated with three women and four men – including the unlucky man who had gotten his teeth bashed in. He looked only marginally better than he did last night.
Turnbull slid into a chair facing the front door, but with easy access to the corridor leading to the rear. From there, he could dominate the entire room.
Bellman sat at the head of the table.
“Hello. Thanks for coming out. This is my friend Kelly. He’s… not from around here.”
“What are we going to do?” Dale Chalmers said, his voice muffled by his ruined teeth and swollen lips.
“That’s what we’re here to figure out.”
“I went to the Sheriff’s Department to report what happened this morning and they laughed at me,” said an older woman with her grey hair in a bun. She seemed genuinely surprised, as if she had been asleep for the last decade.
“Martha, we need to realize that the situation has changed. We can’t rely on the government to protect us,” Bellman said.
“We should just leave, all of us,” said a middle aged man. “Go south. Get out of here.”
“We can run,” Bellman said. “That’s one option. But this is our home.”
“Maybe I can work with them, come to some reasonable arrangement,” said a middle aged man in a sport coat.
“This is Larry Silvers, our mayor,” said Pastor Bellman. “His real job is real estate – or was, before it became almost impossible to sell property.”
“You think that might work?” Kelly asked.
“It might. Better to try and make a deal then go on like this. At least that’s how I see it.”
“Be my guest,” Turnbull replied, his optimism meter far into the red.
“We should dig up our guns and kill those sons of bitches,” Chalmers said, sputtering. Turnbull looked him over; he was no soldier, but he was certainly pissed.