“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—”
“Just a minute.” George Christopher’s voice was a mixture of interest and incredulity. “Henry Armitage was a preacher on the radio. I used to listen to him. He was a good man. Now you say he’s crazy?”
Hugo had trouble looking Christopher in the eye, but his voice was firm enough. “Mr. Christopher, he’s so far around the bend that he can’t see the bend from there. Listen, people, you know there were people driven nuts by Hammerfall. Armitage had more reason than most.”
“He made sense. He always made sense. All right, go on. What drove him nuts, and why would he tell you about it?”
“Why, it was part of his speech! He told us how he knew the Hammer of God was bringing an end to the world. He warned the world as best he could — radio, television, newspaper—”
“That part’s straight,” George said.
“And on the last day he took fifty good friends, not just members of his congregation, but friends, and his family, up to the top of a mountain to watch. They saw three of the strikes. They went through that weird rain that started with pellets of hot mud and ended like Noah’s Flood, and Armitage waited for the angels.
“None of us laughed when he said that. But then it wasn’t just the prisoners listening, a lot of the… Angels of the Lord, they call themselves, were circled around listening. Every so often they’d shout, ‘Amen!’ and wave their guns at us. We didn’t dare laugh.
“Armitage waited for the angels to come for his flock. They never came. By and by they went downhill again, looking for safety.
“They went along the shore of the San Joaquin Sea, and everywhere they saw corpses. Some of Armitage’s friends lost hope and died. He was in despair. They found all kinds of horrors, places where the cannibals had been. Some of them got sick, a couple got shot when they tried to go up to a half-submerged school—”
“Get on with it,” said the Senator.
“Yessir, I’m trying. The next part’s hazy. All this time Armitage was trying to figure out where the hell all the angels had gone — so to speak. Somewhere in his wanderings he got it. Also, Jerry Owen fits in somehow.”
“Owen?”
“Yes. This was the group he’d joined. According to Jerry, it was him who put new life into Armitage. I don’t know if any of that’s true. I do know that just after Jerry hooked up with him, Armitage ran into the cannibal band and now it’s calling itself the New Brotherhood Army, and it’s led by the Angels of the Lord.”
“And Jerry Owen is their general?” George Christopher said. He seemed to think that was funny.
“No, sir. I don’t know what he is. He’s some kind of leader, but I don’t think he’s all that important. Let me tell this please. I have to tell somebody.” He lifted the whiskey glass and stared at it. “This is what Armitage told the cannibals, and this is what he told us.”
Hugo gave himself time to think by finishing the whiskey. Hugo was doing fine, Harry thought; he was not going to disgrace Harry.