Plague

CHAPTER 30

Robert Greyjoy drove through a quiet suburb near Honolulu in a stolen Range Rover. Well, stolen wasn’t the correct word; most cars had been abandoned on the side of the road and he happened to find one that had a half tank of gas left.

The neighborhood was clearly middle to upper class. You could always tell based on the cars parked in the driveway. Some people put themselves in massive lifetime debt over their homes and then had nothing left over for the cars. Cars were much more useful for predicting the socio-economic climate of a neighborhood than any other factor except for the maintenance of the lawns.

A group of men were walking by on the street and they eyed him. One had his shirt off and he had a large tattoo of a shark on his back. He threw up some sort of gang sign and Robert laughed despite himself. He kept driving.

There was a young girl on the corner, perhaps no more than twelve. Another shirtless man with tattoos held her by the arm and was clearly scolding her. He looked over and saw Robert’s car and said something to the girl before disappearing into a house.

The girl casually walked in front of Robert’s car and he had to slam on his brakes to avoid a collision. She came up to the window. She was lovely, Robert thought. Dark hair with emerald eyes rimmed red from crying. She was wearing a sundress with high-heels that she clearly was not accustomed to.

“Are you looking for sex?” she said.

Robert grinned. “I think what you want to ask is if I’m looking to party or looking for a good time. If you say ‘looking for sex’ you’ll scare most people off.”

“Are you looking to party?” she said timidly.

“How old are you?”

“Old enough.”

“No, you’re not. Why are you out here?”

She looked down to the ground. She seemed somewhere else for a few moments and then looked up again. “Do you want sex or not?”

“No.”

She turned and went back to her corner. Robert pulled his Range Rover over to the curb and stepped out. He locked the doors, not that that would really help now, and then walked to the girl.

“That man that was out here with you. Who is he?”

“None of your business.”

He leaned down, looking into her eyes. His stare had power. There was a time when he would work on it in the mirror, but that seemed like ages ago. His eyes were reflections of what was inside. Work on the interior, and the exterior will follow.

“Who is he?” he said flatly, menace in his voice.

“My…my mama died and they take care of me.”

“How do they take care of you?”

“They gimmie food and I can sleep in the closet. They protect me.”

“How many of them are there?” She didn’t say anything and Robert grabbed her arm and squeezed gently. “How many?”

“Six, and two other girls.”

The man that had been out here before came out again, a cigarette dangling from his lips. “Hey, man, you gonna fuck her or what?”

“How much?” Robert said, beginning to walk toward the man.

“We ain’t take no money no more. Ain’t no stores open anyway. You gotta come up with somethin’ to trade. Last dude gave us a gold watch.”

Robert was only a few feet away from him now. “Gold watch? Hm. How’s this one?” he said, holding up his watch.

“That don’t look like no watch I-”

Robert spun and grabbed his arm, twisting it behind him so violently that the man sucked down his cigarette. He forced the arm up, nearly parallel to the shoulder, using the man’s body weight and gravity. There was a snap in his shoulder. The man screamed.

The man reached for a gun that was tucked in the small of his back. Robert grabbed two of his fingers and jerked them to the side, breaking them, and took the gun himself. It was a Beretta.

“Nice gun,” Robert said, admiring the weapon. He put the barrel to the back of the man’s head near the cerebellum and pulled the trigger. There was no blood at first, just a hole with a bit of gray smoke wafting out.

The man dropped to his knees and Robert pushed him over with the tip of his shoe. He looked to the girl and smiled, before walking up the street into the house.

There was a woman of about forty and a man on the couch smoking something out of a broken lightbulb. Robert put a slug into his left eye. The woman was about to scream and he grabbed her by the hair, using it as a handle, and slammed her face through the glass coffee table. He flipped her back to the couch. Her face looked like bloodied meat and she began to scream.

“No! No, please. I didn’t do nothing.”

“Exactly,” Robert said, leaning over her and picking a few shards of glass out of her face. “God is not passive. He doesn’t forgive you simply because you do nothing in the face of evil. Inaction, is action.”

She opened her mouth to speak and Robert put his palm against her chin and violently jerked her head with his other hand. After a muted crack, like a cob of corn snapping in half, she went limp. There was still some life in her eyes as Robert leaned her back on the couch and watched her. It would take three minutes for her to faint from lack of oxygen, four minutes for her to fall into a deep unconsciousness and her heart to stop, six minutes for her brain to die. He wondered what those last few seconds before death were like.

The essayist and philosopher Montaigne had been severely injured in a horse riding accident and his lungs slowly filled with blood as he drifted off to death, though he survived by some miracle. He said it was the most pleasant sensation he had ever felt.

In a way, Robert envied this woman. In six minutes the Great Secret would be revealed to her. She would have more knowledge than any scientist or philosopher that had ever lived.

He sighed, and continued through the house.

A man with dreadlocks was in the kitchen with food lying out on the counter in front of him. His earphones were blaring metal. He turned to Robert and gave a quizzical look just as Robert put two holes in his chest.

Robert went upstairs and found another man, who he shot in the back of the head while he was sitting in front of a computer, and then came back downstairs. Including the woman, that was five. Did the girl mean six men or six adults total?

Robert quickly went through the rest of the house. It was in squalor with garbage thrown on the carpets and colonies of ants and cockroaches throughout the various rooms. Robert pulled out a scented handkerchief and kept it to his nose as he walked through the final bedroom. There was no one else here.

He heard a noise outside and instinctively lowered himself to the ground. He duck-walked out to the back door and saw a man working on a car, a cell phone glued to his ear. Robert glanced around and saw no one else. He waited a full minute, and then stepped outside.

“Excuse me,” he said, “what’s your name?”

“Who the fuck are you?”

A large metal cylinder lay on a small workbench next to the man and Robert grabbed it and bashed it into the man’s mouth. He heard teeth crack and the man flew off his feet.

Robert brought the heavy cylinder down onto the man’s toes and then his ankles, slamming it into his flesh over and over and over. When he was convinced his feet were too mangled to walk, Robert sat down on a crate that was turned upside down just outside the garage entrance.

“I asked you what your name was.”

The man was cursing and shouting and yelping in pain. His mouth was foaming as he spit curses, holding his limp feet in his hands.

“You fuckin’ broke my legs!”

“No, I did not. I broke your ankles and your feet. Don’t be such a coward. Now, what was your name?”

“Fuck you.”

“Fine, then let’s avoid pleasantries and get to the only question I actually care about: that girl you’re pimping outside, where did you find her?”

“Fuck you!”

Robert picked up the cylinder again and crashed it into his wrist, causing another round of screaming and swearing. He waited until the man had calmed down and then asked him again, “Where did you find her?”

“I don’t know, man.”

“Oh, you’re confused.”

Another crash of the cylinder, this one on his other wrist.

“All right! Just stop, fuckin’ stop!”

“Where?”

“The school, man, the fuckin’ junior high. Lotta their parents died from the coffee lung and they was stayin’ there. That’s how we get our girls, man. From the school.”

“Coffee lung?”

“Yeah, man. The sickness.”

Robert remembered reading a report on the plane over to Hawaii stating that victims of Agent X were vomiting blood that had mass in it that resembled coffee grounds.

“Clever name. So how many girls do you have?”

“I don’t know, a lot. We got ‘em everywhere. We need a lot of ‘em.”

“Why do you need a lot of them?” Robert asked. The man remained silent and Robert said, “Oh, people with coffee lung have sex with them and then the girls get it too and can’t work anymore, is that it?”

He nodded. Unable to hold his feet with his broken wrists, his weary head just tilted to the side.

“Amazing,” Robert said, “people that ill, vomiting life out of them, still want to have sex. That’s fascinating. I wonder if Freud was right and sex is our primary motivation in all things? We have the power to explore the atom and distant galaxies and we use the majority of our brains to find sex. What a sad little species we would be if that were true.” Robert was silent a moment as he thought about this. He decided it was an issue he would consider later and pushed it aside in his mind. “So, the question is, what are we going to do? I’m assuming your operation is larger than the six of you I found here, so if I were to kill you it probably wouldn’t stop much.”

“I swear, man,” he said out of breath and going into shock. “I swear, you let me live and I will never do that shit again. Never.”

“Never ever? If we pinky swear?”

“What?”

Robert laughed. “No, you’re going to have to do better than that.”

“What do you want?”

“What do I want? Hm, well, there’s a house not two blocks from here with two Iranian fellows. I want you to knock on their door and when they come out I’m going to shoot them.” Robert looked into the garage. “By the way, whoever’s back there, I can see your shoes underneath the car. Come on out and join us.”

There was a moment of quiet before the shoes shuffled across the cement and a young girl emerged. She was perhaps sixteen and shivering from fear. She stood there looking at the ground, not making eye contact.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?”

“Randi.”

“Randi, do you want to be here?”

She glanced up and then back down to the ground. “I’m his girl.”

“You’re his girl, you’re his girl.” Robert looked down to the man. “So are you going to knock on that door for me?”

“I think you broke my ankles, man. I can’t walk. But she could do it. It’ll be better ‘cause they won’t be expectin’ nothin’ from a girl.”

“Hm, not a bad idea. You’re right, I will use her.” Robert lifted his weapon.

“No!”

He fired one round, the slug entering just to the right of the nose into the corner of the eye. The man fell back as it ricocheted in his skull, having the velocity to enter but not the velocity to exit.

Robert smiled at the girl. “You’re not his girl anymore. Do you understand?” She nodded. “Randi, I’m guessing there’re a lot of you girls around here, is that right?” She nodded again. “Everyone here is dead. Get the girls and clear out. Find somewhere nicer. There are shelters set up farther in town, go there. Or go to a church. But stay away from men right now. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Good. I’m sure there are guns in this house. After you do what I’m going to ask you to do, come back and carry one or even two with you at all times.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Very simple. We’re going to walk to a house two blocks away. You’re going to knock on the door and tell whoever answers that you need help and that you need two people to help you. Don’t tell them what help you need. Just panic and scream. Scream as loud as you can. As soon as the men come to the door, you jump down onto the ground. Do you think you can do that?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

“What are you going to do to those men?”

“I’m going to be hiding and then I’m going to shoot them in the heart. Is that something you have a problem with?”

She thought for a moment and then shook her head.

“Good,” Robert said with a smile, “then you and I are going to get along just fine.”

He held out his hand and she took it.