He didn't bother turning his head when the guards came through the door. In any case he was preoccupied with releasing the electronic locks on the emergency exits. The inmates had the double perimeter fence to scale before losing themselves in the luxuriant flora of Star-buck, but maybe a few would make it and contaminate the island with their virus-rich bodies. Undetected, they might even breed and produce a race of monsters.
Skrote would never know how successful this latest experiment would turn out to be, for he died almost instantly as the combined impact of seven bullets lifted him bodily from the chair, a smile and a soundless name on his lips.
26
Baz Brannigan's eyes were wide and blue and mad. His corn-colored hair was in disarray, as if he'd just that minute woken from a sweating nightmare. The hands gripping the rifle were as tight as claws. "Sure! Take who you want and get the hell out--only Dan stays
here. He stays here for good, whether you like it or not, Mr. Chase." The polite use of his name sounded like a slur.
"Doesn't your father have a say in this?"
"I don't take orders from nobody." Baz jerked his head to include the group around him, all in their late teens and early twenties, all carrying weapons. "We run the settlement. We say who goes and who stays. There's a war on, or maybe you hadn't noticed."
Chase frowned. "War?"
"You're dumb, plain dumb.
The trouble was, he seemed perfectly serious. Chase looked across the square to the stores and the wooden schoolhouse. Baz had taken the council hall as his headquarters, a self-styled guerrilla leader with delusions of grandeur. He saw the Goose Lake settlement as the last outpost holding out against a tidal wave of corrupt humanity. The irony was that the worm was gnawing away from within. Their "pure" community was rotten to the core.
Chase tried to tell him as much. "What's happening in the south is going to happen here. You can't keep it out with guns, Baz. This disease you talk about is in the atmosphere, it isn't caused by the people who are suffering from it. Cheryl caught the disease and she's been here for five years."
One of the other young men who'd been with Baz on the road eased himself off the porch rail. "Then the sooner you and her fuck off, the better. And take the woman you came with and get out. Now." He levered the bolt back and swung the rifle around so that it was pointing at Chase's head.
"Not without my son. You've no right to hold him."
Baz sniggered. His eyes were huge and round, the pupils dilated. "Are you going to take him, Mr. Chase? One guy against thirty?" He made the same sound and glanced around. "I said he was dumb."
"He did something that was very wrong," Chase said, facing them. "I'm not excusing that. But you're not the law around here and you don't dispense justice. You were partly to blame, in fact, for giving him the drugs."
"Dan wanted a piece of ass and so he took it," Baz said indifferently. "That stuck-up bitch got what was coming to her. What's all this crap about justice? You must have been living in a cave or in some goddamn ivory tower."
"Then why are you holding him?" He couldn't make sense of this. Perhaps the only sense resided in the convoluted workings of Baz Brannigan's drugged brain and it was futile to expect a logical explanation.
"Tell him he can go screw himself," said a slurred voice from the group. "We don't have to take this hassle."
"Damn right, we don't." Baz raised his rifle and Chase saw that several small notches had been cut in the polished stock. A tally of animal--or human?--kills. "Get your gear together and get out. 1 want you off the settlement by sundown, and take the sick woman with you."
Chase stood his ground. "I demand right now to see my son. I have a right-"
A spasm of insane fury broke across Baz Brannigan's face, which under its ruddy tan had a gray pallor. "I've told you what to do and I'm not going to repeat it. I'm all through with words. From here on we talk in bullets."
"It's impossible, you can't reason with them," Nick said later in the cabin. "In the end it all comes down to brute force. What are you going to do?"
"What about you?" Chase said, looking out at the majestic sweep of mountains to the north. Was Boris still out there somewhere? "Are you coming with us?"
Nick leaned against the stone mantel, hands in pockets, and stared down at his shoes. "This place isn't going to last much longer, not with Baz and his cronies running things." He glanced up. "We'll come with you if it's possible, but there's the problem of getting out--there isn't room for all of us in one jeep."
"There must be other transport."
