The Dead Town

Chapter 28

Sammy Chakrabarty always thought the old building that housed KBOW was an ugly pile, but the features that made it off-putting in the past were virtues in the current crisis.

Built in the 1870s by the local arm of the Patrons of Husbandry, otherwise known as the Grange, it served as the Grange Hall, offices and meeting rooms and a big space for community dinners and dances. The Granger movement was an organization of farmers who, in those days, wanted the government to confiscate and operate the railroads and the grain elevators as a public service, thus shifting some of the farmers’ costs from them to the taxpayers.

For most people in the Grange, the motivation was self-interest, but as in any such political organization, a minority of the members were also paranoids. When you were lobbying to have the government seize some people’s property for your benefit, it wasn’t paranoid to think those on the losing end of that deal might take decisive action to halt your activities, might even come around one night with the intention of using more than words to persuade you to rethink your position. But the truest apostles of the paranoid faith spread wild stories, fevered fantasies of bloodbaths in distant states, fierce armies of railroad goons and brutal mercenaries in the employ of grain-elevator barons, entire units of the Grange shot in cold blood, hundreds of people at a time, shot and beaten and stabbed and set on fire and then shot again and then hung and then rehung, and subjected to verbal abuse, their farm animals sold into slavery, their dogs forced to wear humiliating costumes, their barns burned, their land salted and paprikaed.

As Sammy quickly walked the rooms and the hallways of KBOW, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of this fort, he figured that the head of the building committee for the Rainbow Falls Grange had been one of the squirreliest of the group, forcing a design that assumed any Grange supper-and-dance night could become a battleground and the building put under siege. The exterior walls, alternating layers of concrete and brick, were eighteen inches thick. The double-hung windows were kept to a minimum number, narrow and protected by decorative bronze grids that were essentially attractive prison bars. In respect of the building’s historical status, the decorative bronze doors remained, as well, one on each side of the structure, but they were so heavy that they had been retrofitted with concealed ball-bearing hinges to make them easier to use.

By design, nothing in the construction materials was flammable. Yet the contents of the place would have made it a firetrap without the sprinkler system that had been added decades ago to meet the building-code requirements for KBOW to occupy the premises.

The parapeted, nearly flat roof featured glazed-brick paving sloped just enough to the perimeter scuppers to let rain drain off quickly. In snow season, maintenance men regularly shoveled the roof. But tonight would be the first time — at least in recent history — that a gunman would be stationed up there to defend the building.

Ralph Nettles and Deucalion were gone less than ten minutes, and they returned with enough firearms to delight the paranoid head of the Grange building committee if he had still been alive to see them. Six pistols, four assault rifles, three pistol-grip shotguns. They also brought several metal ammunition boxes with strap handles, packed with boxed ammo and with preloaded spare magazines for the various weapons.

In the conference room, which they had chosen to designate the armory, Sammy said to Ralph, “I know you’re not a gun nut in the negative sense.”

“How do you know?” Ralph asked, sweeping his arms wide to indicate the array of firearms on the conference table. “This is like one-fifth of my collection — and none are antiques.”

“You’re not any kind of nut. You’re steady. So you have some good reason to gun-up like this.”

Ralph hesitated. He wasn’t a guy who talked much about himself. “I used to have only a single pistol for the nightstand drawer. Eight years ago this past September, I started the collection.”

Eight years earlier, Sammy had been just fifteen, a high-school student in Corona del Mar, California, where his parents lived.

Deucalion said to Ralph, “Your wife died eight years ago.”

Sammy knew this but hadn’t made the connection.

“Jenny couldn’t die that young. She was so good. So very alive. It was the most impossible thing that could ever, ever happen. But it happened. So I knew then everything else that seemed impossible might happen, too. All my life, I’ve been practical, prudent, prepared. The three P’s — that’s what my mother called them. There was no way I could have been prepared for Jenny dying, but the day I buried her, I swore to myself I’d be ready for every other impossible thing that could happen next. So maybe I am a nut, after all.”

Sammy glanced at Deucalion, saw pulses of strange light throb through the giant’s eyes, and looked at Ralph again. “Evidently not.”