Lewis found a roll of baling wire and bound their wrists behind their backs, then sat them on the ground and bound their ankles. That done, Peter chose three AK rifles and three Beretta pistols from the third cabinet. He found a plastic storage crate and loaded it with spare magazines, sound suppressors, and ammunition. “How much?”
Nickels gave them a price and Lewis didn’t even haggle, just took a wad of folded bills from his pocket and counted hundreds onto the counter.
Peter found another crate and began to fill it with boxes of armor-piercing rounds.
“I need those,” Nickels said. “There’ll be hell to pay if you take them.”
“Tell me who’s buying and I’ll leave them.” Although he wouldn’t leave them. He couldn’t live with himself.
Nickels flexed his jaw and shook his head. Peter loaded the rest of the AP boxes started carrying gear out to the Tahoe. By the clock,they’d only been inside the shed for fifteen minutes. Peter had no desire to meet Cousin Vance and his friends.
They left the dead man in the mud.
—
Back on the highway, Peter said, “I thought you said these guys weren’t crazy.”
Lewis shrugged. “People change.”
“You think they rob all their customers?”
Lewis shook his head. “It don’t make sense. There’d be retribution. The kind of people looking for untraceable full-auto assault weapons ain’t the kind of people you want to piss off.” Lewis looked out the window into the speeding darkness. “Unless that old lady just kills ’em. You suppose we went back in daylight we’d find some shallow graves?”
“Maybe they don’t care about long-term consequences,” Peter said. “They’re just raising cash any way they can. And they’re accumulating a serious arsenal, including armor-piercing ammo. Like they think the end of the world is coming any day now.”
Lewis looked at him, eyebrows climbing high. “Motherfucker. You think?”
“All that stuff about barbarians at the gates? Your time is coming? Sound familiar?”
“You think these ding-dongs are connected to the Messenger. The Dark Time and all that.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But you told me these guys sold to everybody, right? And they’re scared of somebody. How many freaky assholes can there be around here planning something big?”
“We should’ve looked for cassette tapes.” Lewis flashed him his tilted grin. “You want to go back and see Mama, search the house?”
Peter thought about all those guns in that machine shop. Then he thought about Cousin Vance and the kind of friends he probably had, how ugly it would get if he and Lewis went back up there. Somebody else would die for sure, and no guarantees on who it might be.
“No,” Peter said. “I most definitely do not.”
33
Hollis
Well after midnight, Hollis Longro sat in the electric SUV outside a Walgreens. With the leather driver’s seat tipped way back, hat over his eyes, phone on his lap, he waited for the borrowed vehicle to charge.
Although it wasn’t borrowed anymore, he thought. The owner was dead. The Rivian was Hollis’s now.
He liked the electric SUV more than he cared to admit. It was a lot more comfortable than his old Toyota pickup. The acceleration was insane. Driving it felt like the future, or how he’d thought the future would be when he was a kid. But he’d been wrong about that. The future wasn’t sleek or cool or easy. It was the world’s largest axe, just waiting to fall.
He did miss the Toyota. He’d put a lot of miles on that truck in the last few years, riding the circuit, delivering the Messenger’s news and recruiting members to their cause. It had served him well. But now it was gone. Like so many things.
Eight years ago, when it all started, the man wasn’t calling himself the Messenger yet. He was plain old Gary, an unemployed electrical engineer standing on a wooden box on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered pulp mill, trying to warn people about what was coming.
He didn’t call it the Dark Time then, either. Or the Time of Undoing. He came up with those later.
But the ideas were there from the beginning. The ravenous Industrial Machine, eating humanity to fuel its own growth. How things had changed from the world they had grown up in. How the future would keep changing for the worse unless they did something about it.
The Messenger had been right back then, and he was even more right now. The last eight years had only proved his point.
