D. MacHale - Storm

Somebody was pulling a Wizard of Oz stunt on me.

“Tucker Pierce. Where are my friends?”

“Why are you here?” she asked, ignoring my question. “We heard the radio broadcast,” I replied, and as soon as I said that, a thought hit me. “Wait, the broadcast voice sounded like you. Who are you ?”

“Where did you come from?” she asked.

I had been through an interrogation like this once before, when I was captured and sent to the SYLO compound on Pemberwick Island. I half expected Captain Granger to come strolling out from behind the big head/mask/statue/Oz/whatever/thing. “We came from Pemberwick Island. We’re looking for…” I didn’t finish the sentence. I had to be careful. There was no way to know who this woman was or who the bikers were who had drugged and captured us like wild animals.

“Why don’t you cut the show and just talk to me?” I asked. “We need to know exactly who you are and why you came here,” she said. “Your friends are safe and are also being questioned. If we are satisfied with your answers, we will join you.”

“And what if you aren’t satisfied?”

“You will die.”

Oh.

I had never been a great test-taker. I hoped I was up to the challenge. The only thing I could do was speak truthfully. If I thought lying would have helped, I would have lied, but without having any idea who my interrogator was, I figured it was best to just tell the truth.

I told her the whole story, beginning with Marty Wiggins’s death and ending with the bikers showing up to the Valley of Fire.

It took a while. It was a long story.

The mask listened without asking questions. At least I think it was listening. It was hard to tell. It was a mask. My hope was that the others were telling the same story. If somebody (Kent) tried to get clever and head off in another direction, it could doom us all because then none of us would look credible.

I finished the story by saying, “And then I ended up here, chained to the floor, talking to a giant mask. It’s been a hell of a couple of weeks.”

There was a long silence. I think I was more nervous at that point than any time before. It was like being a defendant waiting for the jury to come back with a verdict. Only this wouldn’t just be a verdict, it would be a sentence: life or death. The spotlight went out, and I was back in black.

“Whoa!” I called. “I told you the truth. What more do you want from me?” Another light appeared, only this one was much smaller, and it was moving. It came from behind the big mask, and I realized it was somebody with a headlamp.

One word came to mind: executioner.

I pulled against the chain that held me to the floor in the dumb hope that it would break loose, as opposed to the other dozen times I had tried.

“Look,” I said nervously, “there’s been way too much killing already.”

The person didn’t respond. The light moved closer until their shadow loomed over me.

I had a strange reaction. A second before I had been terrified.

That terror changed to anger.

“You know what? Go ahead. Kill me. I’m done. You’d be doing me a favor. Use whatever magic weapon you’ve got and just do it!” I’m not sure if I meant it. The killing part, that is. But I was definitely tired of being scared and didn’t want to deal anymore. The person stood there for a moment, then reached into a pocket and pulled out a set of keys. The person knelt down and unlocked the shackle around my ankle.

I immediately pulled away and curled into a ball on the far end of the mat.

“How old are you?” the person asked. It was the same woman whose voice had been amplified during the interrogation. “Fourteen,” I replied.

“Jeez,” she said and rubbed at her eyes. “You’re a baby.” Was she crying?

“I’ve heard a lot of stories over the last couple of weeks,” she said. “But yours takes the cake. You gotta be some kind of special kid to come through all that.”

“So you believe me?” I asked.

“It’s the exact same story the others told,” she said. “So either you’ve all done a good job of cooking this up or it’s the truth.” She had a slight drawl, which made me believe she had come from these parts.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My name’s Charlotte,” she replied. “I’m a Cook County sheriff. At least I used to be.”

“So you’re not with SYLO? Or the Retros?”

“To be honest with you, Tucker, I never heard the term ‘Retros’ before you all showed up, and all I know about SYLO is that it’s the military outfit from the Navy that quarantined Pemberwick Island. We’re not part of either.”

“So then who are you?” I asked. “And would you mind losing the headlight?”

“Oh, sorry,” she said as she pulled the lamp off. She placed it on a chair I had no idea was next to me, shining the light back on herself. Charlotte had short blonde hair. Though she was small, she looked wiry and tough, like you’d expect a county sheriff to be. She looked about as old as my mom, but unlike my mom, I wouldn’t challenge her to an arm-wrestling contest. She had on her uniform, which was dark pants and a khaki shirt with sleeve patches that said: “Clark County Sheriff.” The shirt was wrinkled and worn. She’d been wearing it for a while.

“I’m just like you,” she replied. “A survivor of the massacre.”

“So the broadcast was real? You’re calling out to other survivors?”

“Real as rain, darlin’,” she said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not one to take something like this sitting down. No, I take that back. I do know about you. You came a long way to be here. You may be young, but you’re a fighter.”

“What was with the bikers? And knocking us out in the middle of the desert?”

“Security,” she replied. “Anybody can hear that broadcast. We meet folks out in the middle of nowhere and bring ’em back here to size ’em up. To figure out if they’re with us or against us.”

“So there are others?” I asked. Charlotte chuckled.

“You ain’t the only one left in the world with some fight in ’em.

They’ve been coming from all over the country. From Canada and Mexico too. I’ve been doing plenty of these interrogations. Guess it comes from being a sheriff. I like the whole big-mask thing. Freaks people out. It’s good to keep your subject off-balance.” Charlotte liked her job.

“Has anybody failed the test?” I asked Her expression turned dark.

“You may think we’re a loose bunch of delusional desperados, but make no mistake, young man, we are deadly serious. There have been a couple of bad seeds that the Air Force sent out on a… what would you call it? An exploratory mission. They didn’t pass the smell test.”

“And what happened to them?”

“They were sent back out into the desert,” she said with a shrug. “They won’t be comin’ back.”

“Oh man,” I said, stunned.

“I didn’t give it a second thought,” she said. “After what they done, they got off easy.”

My head was spinning, and it wasn’t because of the tranquilizer. As much as I had hoped that the broadcast was real and we would be meeting up with other survivors, deep down I didn’t believe it would happen.

I looked around at the darkened room and said, “So if I passed the test, are you going to tell me where we are?”

Charlotte gave me a mischievous smile.

“Better to show you. The sun’s just coming up, thank God.

The nights are just too eerie for me. I’ve lived here my whole life, and there was never a time that the city wasn’t lit up at night as bright and sparkly as a Christmas tree. Not anymore. Now every light we’ve got runs on batteries.”