“I’ll see to it,” Hardy said.
“Thank you.” Jellison went to his high-backed chair and sat. “Sorry to keep you waiting. They like me to take a nap in the afternoon. Mr. Beck, has anyone made you any promises?”
“Just Harry.” The gift of a chair had restored some of Hugo’s composure. “I get to leave here alive. That’s all.”
“All right. Tell your story.”
Hugo nodded. “You put Jerry Owen and me on the road, remember? Jerry was mad enough to kill. He talked about… well, revenge, about the seeds of rebellion he’d planted in your men, Mr. Christopher.”
George smiled broadly. “They damn near kicked him to death.”
“Right, Jerry couldn’t move very fast, and I didn’t want to go on alone. It was spooky out there. Somebody shot at us once, no warning, just zing! and we ran like hell. We went south because that’s the way the road faced, and Jerry wasn’t in shape to climb up into the Sierra. Neither was I. We walked all day and most of the night, and I don’t know how far we got because all we had was an old Union Oil map and everything’s changed now. Jerry found some grain growing by the side of the road. It looked like weeds, but he said we could eat it, and the next day we managed a fire and cooked it. It’s good.”
“Okay, we don’t need the story of every meal you scrounged,” Christopher growled.
“Sorry. The next part’s important, though. Jerry was telling me weird things. Did you know he was wanted by the FBI and everyone else too? He was a general — in the” — Hugo paused — “New Brotherhood Liberation Army.” Hugo paused to let it sink in.
“New Brotherhood,” Al Hardy mused. “I guess that does fit.”
“I think so,” Hugo said. “Anyway, he was using the Shire as a hideout. He kept his mouth shut and we never knew, until after Hammerfall. We were probably in Mr. Wilson’s territory, and I was thinking about ditching Jerry. Being slowed down didn’t bother me, but how was I going to join Mr. Wilson’s crew if Jerry wanted to start a people’s revolution? If I’d seen so much as a lighted window I’d have been gone, and Jerry’d never have known where.
“But we didn’t see anything much. A truck once, but it didn’t stop. And barricaded farmhouses, where they set the dogs on us if we tried to get close. So we kept going south and getting hungrier, and about the third or fourth day we saw this scraggly-looking bunch of people. Every one of them looked like he’d lost his last chance, but there were at least fifty of them, and they didn’t look like they were starving.
“I was thinking about running, but Jerry walked right up to them. He called to me to come on with him, but they didn’t look like any outfit I wanted to join. I thought it might be the cannibals Harry told us about, but they didn’t look dangerous, they just looked finished.”
“No Army uniforms? No guns?” Deke Wilson asked.
“I didn’t get close enough to see what weapons they had, but there sure as hell weren’t any Army uniforms,” Hugo Beck said.
“Then that wasn’t the New Brotherhood Army—”
“Just listen,” Harry interrupted. “He’s not finished yet.”
Eileen came in with a tray. “Here’s your tea, Harry.” She poured a cup and set it on the table next to the mailman. “And yours, Senator.”
Beck looked at Harry’s tea, then sipped at his glass of water. “Well, Jerry went in with that outfit, and I split. I figured I’d seen the last of him, and I could get back up to Mr. Wilson’s turf again. Instead I ran into an old lady and her daughter. They lived in a little house in the middle of an almond grove, and they didn’t have any guns. Nobody’d bothered them because they lived way off the road, and they hadn’t been out since Hammerfall. The girl was seventeen, and she wasn’t in good shape. She had fever, bad, probably from the water. I took care of them.” Hugo Beck said it defiantly. “And I earned my keep, too.”
“What did you live on?” Mayor Seitz asked.
“Almonds, mostly. Some canned stuff the old lady had put up. And a couple of bushels of potatoes.”
“What happened to them?” George Christopher demanded.
“I’m coming to that.” Hugo Beck shuddered. “I stayed there three weeks. Cheryl was pretty sick, but I made them boil all the water, and she came out of it. She was looking pretty good, when — ” Beck broke off, and visibly fought for self-control. There were tears in his eyes. “I really got to like her.” He broke off again. Everyone waited.
“We couldn’t go anywhere because of Mrs. Horne. Cheryl’s grandmother. Mrs. Horne kept telling us to light out, leave before somebody found us, but we couldn’t do that.” Beck shrugged. “So they found us. First a jeep went by. It didn’t stop, but the people in it looked tough. We thought we’d make a run for it, but we hadn’t got a mile when a truck came up to the house, and people got out of it looking for us. I guess they tracked us, because it wasn’t long after that about ten people with guns came and grabbed us. They didn’t talk to us at all. They just threw Cheryl and me in the truck and drove. I think some of the others moved into the house with Mrs. Home. From what happened afterwards I’m sure of it. They wouldn’t waste a place like that. And I’m sure now they killed her, but we didn’t know that.
“They took us a few miles in the truck. It was dark by the time we got there. They had campfires. Three or four anyway. I kept asking what was going to happen to us, and they kept telling me to shut up. Finally one of them told me with his fist, and I didn’t say anything else. When we got to the camp they threw us in with a couple of dozen other people. There were others with guns all around.
“Some of the people in with us were hurt, covered with blood. Gunshot wounds, stab wounds, broken bones…” Hugo shuddered again. “We were glad we didn’t resist. Two of the hurt ones died while we were waiting. There was barbed wire all around us, and three guys with machine guns watching, and all these other people with guns were running around.”
“Uniforms?” Deke Wilson asked.
“Some. One of the guys with a machine gun. A black man with corporal’s stripes.” Hugo seemed reluctant to talk now. The words came slowly, with effort.
Al Hardy looked a question at the Senator. He got a nod and turned to Eileen, who stood in the doorway. He tilted his head toward the study, and she left, walking quickly so she wouldn’t miss the story.
“Cheryl and I got the prisoners to talking,” Hugo Beck said. “There’d been a war, and these lost. They were farmers, they had a setup like Mr. Wilson’s, I think, a bunch of neighbors trying to be left alone.”
“Where was this?” Deke Wilson asked.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. They’re not there anymore,” Hugo said.
Eileen came in with a half-full glass. She took it to Hugo Beck. “Here.”
He drank, looked startled, and drank again, downing half of it. “Thank you. Oh, God, thank you.” The whiskey helped his voice, but it didn’t change the haunted look he gave them. “Then the preacher came,” Hugo said. “He came up to the barbed wire and started in. Listen, I was so scared I don’t remember everything he said. His name was Henry Armitage, and we were in the hands of the Angels of the Lord. He kept talking, sometimes just talk like anybody sometimes in a singsong voice with a lot of ‘my brethren’ and ‘ye people of God, hear and believe.’ We’d all been spared, he said. We’d lived through the end of the world, and we had a purpose in this life. We had to complete the Lord’s work. The Hammer of God had fallen, and the people of God had a holy mission. The part I really listened to was when he told us we could join up or we could die. If we joined we’d get to shoot the ones who didn’t join, and then—”