The Kingdom - Peter Collinson

He switched off the microphone and watched the animals cheering throughout the facility.

Menckley worried his hands like a psoriatic. “Looting was widespread outside the town center,” he said. “Weapons and booze mostly. They’re drunk now, and happy, but it won’t last.”

“No, it won’t,” said Trait, turning to one of the men collecting rifles and tasers and mace from the room, an ex-con known as Burly. “How certain are you that all the residents have been rounded up?”

Burly, a murderer and strongman from Detroit, closely resembled the buzz-cut bank robber in police shooting galleries. “This town’s a ghost town,” he said confidently.

“All loaded onto trucks?”

“All loaded.”

Trait turned to Menckley. “Start video recording. Set the system for exterior lockdown and then drop the package. Make sure you leave yourself enough time to get out.”

Menckley was nervous but excited. “Don’t worry,” he said.

Trait glanced around at the Command Center. He was leaving ADX Gilchrist now, for the last time. But before he could, the police radio on his belt squawked.

It was DeYoung, his radioman back at the police station. “The FBI won’t talk to you live on the air. They say they’ll only speak to you privately.”

Trait nodded. “Good. Then they can just listen like the rest of the country.”

The first hours all ran together. The march to the golf course was an odyssey of whipping wind and gluelike snow, the coldest night Rebecca had ever known. Dawn brought neither sun nor heat, only milky light bleeding into the sky.

Kells kicked in a window in the pro shop to gain access to the country club. There was a stone hearth in the center of the main lounge, shaped like a wide, shallow well, and they gathered newspapers and dry wood for a fire. The flume smoke was a risk overshadowed by the need for heat. They sat around the growing fire, exhausted and smarting, feeling the heat on their cold-hardened faces and awaiting the sear of human thaw.

Rebecca’s jaw defrosted, and she soon regained movement in her fingers and thumbs. She looked around. The lounge was all manufactured rusticity, dark wood and mounted moose heads and Indian hangings. Mia was staring deeply into the fire, her face florid. Darla was struggling to toe off her boots.

As Rebecca’s head began to clear, the march began to fade into memory, supplanted by the outrageous reality of the present. Gilchrist had been overrun by criminals. There were three hundred sociopaths on the loose.

Kells shed his parka and went behind the front desk to the manager’s office. Then he started away down the dark stone-and-timber hallway.

“Who is he?” said Terry, as soon as Kells disappeared around the corner at the long end. “Anybody know? Anybody talk to him?”

Blank stares, exhausted head shakes.

“What he does, where he’s from?” Still no response from the rest. “He was out driving around town after the riot started. You realize — we’re following this person, and we don’t know who or what he is.”

“He carries a gun,” said Fern.

Everyone looked at her, Rebecca included. Fern spoke with regret, knowing she was betraying a trust. “I saw it in his bag when I was changing his towels.”

Terry stood with effort, moving into the managers office. The voices startled them at first, but they were television voices, comforting, authoritative, and one by one they roused themselves to follow Terry. Rebecca was last, behind Coe and Fern, shuffling into the small office.

The screen showed ADX Gilchrist. The camera was set up outside the great fence, the view steady and peaceful, snow falling down.

Rebecca doped it out after a moment. “That must be CNN’s equipment,” she said. This was unprecedented, so far as she knew: The bad guys had broadcasting capability.

A man moved into view wearing prison blues. It was Luther Trait. Rebecca just stared.

He looked more commanding on television. He faced the camera and spoke into it without hesitation.

“Today is a great day,” he began.

“A great day!” said Terry. Everybody shushed him.

“A day that has been a long time coming. A day you dreaded and yet never saw coming.”

Kells returned, filling the only remaining space in the office, standing close over Rebecca’s right shoulder. She tensed but did not turn.

“We have seized control of the Administrative Maximum Unit Penitentiary at Gilchrist. Overnight, we rounded up the citizens of this small town. I want you to know first that our invasion ends here. We have seized this town as fair trade for our mistreatment, and we have no plans to make any further acquisitions. We have no need. Our exile is self-imposed. We have no desire to rejoin your soft society. We ask nothing further from you, and provided that your government and law-enforcement representatives behave appropriately, we pose you no additional threat. As proof of this, we are releasing the captured residents to you at this hour.”

“Releasing?” Dr. Rosen gripped his head, pointed at the television. “He’s releasing the hostages!”

Rebecca could feel the force of Kells’s attention over her shoulder, as though he were focused on Trait’s every word.

“We hold no hostages, and we have no laundry list of demands. All we want is to be left alone. Gilchrist’s geography is fairly self-isolating. Of course, should your government choose to attack us, we would be no match for them. However, we believe such an attack will not occur.”

Terry said, “No?”

“Many of you are familiar with the concept of ‘casualty insurance,’ reimbursement in the event of a catastrophic loss. I have taken out a similar policy myself, in order to ensure our safety here. I call it ‘ multiple casualty insurance.’ ”

She could feel Kells brace.

“Ricin is a natural protein poison extracted from the common castor bean. It is six thousand times more toxic than cyanide, and third overall behind plutonium and botulism. Inhalation of a single particle ignites a chain reaction beginning with flulike symptoms, progressing to exploding red blood cells, internal hemorrhaging, and finally death within a few days. The toxin is odorless and tasteless, and there is no antidote.

“My associates on the outside, fellow pledges of the Brotherhood of Rebellion, have devised a simple, effective mechanism to release the deadly ricin toxin in what is known as a ‘controlled multiple casualty attack.’ What we have done is install these devices in two randomly chosen communities within the United States of America.”

She heard Kells say “Oh, boy,” under his breath.

“This claim may strike some as fantastic. It is difficult to accept the fact that you or your families may be at risk at this very moment, your survival contingent upon the actions of your elected government officials. You may simply think that we are bluffing. I cite an occurrence in Montana a few months ago, the traffic stop of a dedicated associate of mine. I understand that a small bag of white powder was seized, and later opened by an unfortunate police officer who unknowingly released the ricin into the police station, to lethal effect.”

Rebecca’s mind was racing. She remembered the news story as something she had printed offline for her clip file. Surface-to-air missiles, and ten or so policemen bleeding out from an unnamed contaminant.

“But words are cheap. You need to be taken by the hand. Things must be demonstrated for you in order to be believed and understood. What you will watch now is a live feed from the prison monitoring system inside ADX Gilchrist.” The scene switched to surveillance images of prison corridors and offices occupied by cavorting ex-prisoners. “True warriors are rare in the modern world. Only the fittest are deserving of survival, and we will survive. But these weak men were weaned on the permissiveness of your society. They are criminals by occasion and opportunity, not will. They are learning their fate at the same time you are. The prison exits have been locked down. Less than thirty minutes ago we began introducing ricin into the facility’s ventilation system. As you can see, these men feel nothing yet. They smell nothing, they taste nothing. Yet you will see that in a few short hours the first of them will begin to fall ill.”