Let the Devil In Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

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  47

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books-Kindle

  About the Author-Kindle

  LET THE DEVIL IN

  Jeff Haws

  Let the Devil In

  Copyright © 2019 Jeff Haws

  All rights reserved. The book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2019

  ISBN: 978-1-945768-09-5

  Publisher: Shifty Squid, LLC

  P.O. Box 170392

  Atlanta, GA 30317

  Visit the author’s website at http://www.jeff.haws.com

  1

  Zac threw his weight forward, his foot landing square in Benjamin’s chest. He watched Benjamin tumble backward, his legs flying wildly into the air and his head bouncing off the wood floor in the dimly lit, dank basement as his legs flew into the air and landed hollowly at his side. Zac crouched down and straddled him, their faces inches apart.

  “Is this where you want to be? On your back? Helpless?” Zac’s voice raised an octave, his arms spread, looking around at the other men. “One boot to your chest, and you’re on the floor, exposed. I could kill you right now if I wanted to. Easy. Your head’s pounding. Your limbs are useless. You’re fucking hopeless. One kick. One. Is this who we are? Is this who Alessandrans are?”

  Seven men stood around them, their eyes shifting between each other and the scene on the floor. Benjamin was rubbing the back of his head, his eyes wide as he looked up at Zac, who stood up straight and swung his leg over the prone body as he stepped away.

  “You’re all so fucking enamored with freedom,” Zac sneered. “It’s a trap. A lie. A goddamn placebo for the human condition. It’s the empty balm weak leaders peddle to even weaker followers. You want real freedom? It’s there outside the walls Audrey built when she led this town. Go out there, and you’ll find freedom, but you’ll also find a bleak world ravaged by the virus. Death. Disease. Starvation. You want freedom? You get to be back at the bottom of the goddamn food chain again. You’re a fucking caveman. That’s what you want? Then get the hell out of here and walk out of those gates now! Nobody’s gonna stop you.”

  His eyes wild, voice at a fevered pitch, Zac looked around at these men he’d brought together. This all seemed so obvious to him, but it was like no one else saw it. Everyone fetishized freedom, but look where freedom had gotten them—as far as they knew, they were the last organized colony of people left on Earth, and it was a struggle every day to survive until the next.

  Under Audrey’s leadership, the virus stayed out of Alessandra, she kept the hospital running through all the turmoil, built the wall to keep them safe, and made the difficult choices a leader has to make in challenging times. The most consequential choice she made was to require everyone to wear steel rings around their waist when in public in order to prevent the physical contact she believed spread the virus. That also meant banning cohabitation, separating families, and dissolving marriages. It had been a drastic move, and the studies showing contact as the chief means of spreading the virus proved questionable, but the results were clear—H6N1 never breached those walls.

  Audrey certainly cut some corners and wasn’t always perfectly honest, but everything she did was in service of the town’s survival, and it had largely worked. Zac might never forgive Audrey for what she did to his family, but he had to acknowledge grudging respect for her unyielding focus. Even her brother Paul, while he might have gone overboard at times, killed the people he killed because he felt like they endangered the citizens of Alessandra.

  And now, too many people looked back in disgust at their leadership, as if it was a bad thing to stand up against the forces that threaten to tear you apart. Tough times call for tough people. Being in the military had taught Zac that much. He wanted to get the rest of the town to see that, too.

  He considered what had become of Alessandra in the five seasons (roughly fourteen months, but calendars were more difficult to track than the seasons these days) since Stephanie and Michael took on leadership responsibilities in the wake of Paul being murdered by a mob and Audrey disappearing, and he worried about where the town was headed. These two weak-willed people thrust into illegitimate power didn’t seem to understand that this wasn’t a world of fucking butterflies and puppy dogs anymore. Call it nihilism if you want, but the times call for what they call for. Perhaps the day would come when granting people total freedom to live their lives as they wish would be viable, but this harsh, resource-stricken world required rules and the discipline to follow them. And that required leaders willing to do more to enforce those rules than saying “Pretty please” a lot.

  You can’t alter reality, but it can certainly alter you. Zac knew this was hardly the time to worry about what the people wanted; they had to think about what the people needed instead. This was war with nature itself, uncaring and indifferent. Fuck your feelings.

  His fists clenched, arms ramrod straight at his sides, Zac scanned the room, looking each man individually in the eyes. None of them blinked. None of them moved for the door.

  “If you’re gonna stay, then we need to get to work. Look around. Is this the town we want it to be? We’ve lost a lot over the past year, and it’s time we start to get it back. It’s time we assert who we really are. We need to speak our minds and refuse to be shouted down.”

  The men still looked hesitant, but he could sense their confidence growing as they moved in closer. His message was resonating. He was getting through to them.

  “For now, go home. Okay, guys?” Zac nodded, and he saw the gesture mimicked around the room. “Nothing’s gonna change overnight. First, we need to understand what it is we’re fighting for, then come up with a plan to get it. It’s gonna take time and pressure and persistence. A concerted effort. Some of you will have visible roles in this, and I’ll need others to work quietly, helping to spread our message in living rooms and on the street. I’m not gonna lie to you and tell you this will be easy. It won’t be. We’ll face resistance. From people we call friends and neighbors. And there’s a good chance not all of us make it to see this through. But if we stay together with one mind, one mission, by god, we’ll fucking get there.”

  A cry of solidarity rose from several of the men, their fists thrust high over their heads. One of them reached out a hand and helped Benjamin to his feet; he stood and nodded at Zac.

  “Go rest up, fellas,” Zac said. “T
here’s lots more work from here on out.”

  2

  “So what do we do, then?” Stephanie asked, standing up from her couch, raising her arms in an exaggerated shrug.

  Michael shook his head. “Look, I think we both knew discipline and enforcement was gonna be one of the tougher parts of this for us. It’s not like we have a court system or a…fucking Council of Elders or whatever to make these calls.”

  Stephanie rolled her eyes and began pacing the room. “Ignoring it isn’t an option, though. Right? We have to do something. What William did was assault, in any damn court of law that used to exist. Hank’s in the hospital. What should we do? William was one of Audrey’s top officers, and we’ve always figured we have to watch those guys. But now there’s no prison to put him in.”

  Michael shrugged. “Maybe there should be.”

  “We’ve talked about this. The further we head down that road, the closer we get to becoming Audrey.” Stephanie ran her fingers through her black hair, yanking strands tight against her scalp. “That’s not a direction I want to head in.”

  It had been hard for Stephanie and Michael since they led the overthrow of Audrey’s oppressive regime, then had to rebuild a functioning community in the wake of her disappearance. That vanishing act did help in that they didn’t have to figure out how to deal with her, or what threat she might pose to Alessandra going forward. Where their former leader was now—alive or dead—was anyone’s guess.

  It seemed like a natural fit having Stephanie and Michael fill the leadership vacuum for the town, but neither was willing to just take on the mantle without the explicit consent of the citizens they’d be governing. So, after weeks of cajoling by several people, Stephanie agreed to be a candidate for the town’s leader if they organized a vote.

  Six weeks after Audrey fled town, Alessandra’s citizens descended on the town square, where dozens had been murdered a year and a half earlier on the order of Audrey’s brother Paul, to cast their votes for the next leader. Among the 141 voting-age people still living in Alessandra, just sixty-five voted, and fifty-nine chose Stephanie.

  She appointed her ex-husband, Michael, as her co-leader, with equal decision-making power. The idea was that they had different strengths and weaknesses, and they’d complement each other well. Instead of moving into Audrey’s mansion on the hill on the east side of town, Stephanie and Michael lived in modest homes alongside the other townspeople. The mansion and the surrounding compound was locked and boarded up, but could still be seen looming over the town from the square.

  As the transition was happening, Zac lay in a hospital bed, carried there after Stephanie found him lying on Audrey’s bedroom floor, unconscious with a fractured skull. All they could tell was that he had apparently slammed his head into Audrey’s bed post.

  Stephanie knew Zac could be dangerous, but she’d taken an oath as a doctor to help anyone who needed it, and there were few things she believed in more than that. She checked in on him as often as she could until he was finally healthy enough to walk out of the hospital and live on his own, months later. He shook Stephanie’s hand on his way out the door that day; that had been a good moment for her. He said he didn’t remember anything about what happened that day in Audrey’s room.

  By this point, she’d seen how difficult this job was, balancing the town’s need for leadership with her lack of experience with government. Very little in her career as a doctor had prepared her for dealing with all the competing interests that confronted her every day. What size should the rations be? What jobs need to be filled? What needs to be built or fixed? They’d lost a number of people in the ensuing months, life spans shrinking in a world without modern medicine. Babies were born occasionally, but pregnancy and giving birth also carried extra risk, even with a hospital in town. The population was shrinking, and she worried about that. Sometimes, Michael was helpful to bounce ideas off of; other times, he seemed disinterested. Typically, he’d shrug and go with whatever Stephanie’s decision was. But she didn’t want or need a Yes man. She needed someone to challenge her, and Michael didn’t appear to have that in him.

  Stephanie wondered how much being taken and nearly killed by Paul and his men before Stephanie saved him had affected Michael emotionally. She’d given him the space he needed at first, but he wasn’t the same. The confident, assertive man she’d married nearly ten years earlier wasn’t here anymore, it seemed. But she didn’t have time to deal with that. Too much was at stake.

  And now, when she needed someone to push her to do something drastic, she didn’t have that person. Sometimes, it made her envy Audrey’s ability to just throw ethics to the wind and do whatever she deemed necessary. But Stephanie had vowed she was going to govern differently from Audrey in virtually every way. In some situations, though, that put her in a tough position.

  “Okay,” she said, crouching in front of Michael, who was slumped on the couch. “We need to talk to William. One of us does, anyway. I need to go to the hospital and see if I can help Hank. Can you go talk to William?”

  He draped his arm across the back of the couch.

  “I guess so? I wouldn’t say I’m enthusiastic about it.”

  “Michael, I really need your help here. I can’t do all of this by myself. I need you as a partner. I need someone I can trust, and count on here. We’ve been through a lot together, haven’t we? And we’ve come out the other side. We’re here. Right now. This is a tough job, but it’s the position we’re in. We have a responsibility.”

  Stephanie looked deeply into Michael’s eyes, and he stared back. After several seconds, he closed his eyes and nodded slightly.

  “Great. Thank you.” She slapped her hands against his knees. “Get his take on what happened. I’m gonna talk to Hank, see how he’s doing. We’ll figure this out.”

  3

  Zac rapped his knuckles against the house’s front door, then waited, his eyes wandering down the length of the house. Once a canary yellow, the paint was crusting over into a dingy black and brown; the siding was flaking off in several places. Years earlier, there’s a good chance there would have been a flower bed out front, maybe some gardenias or tea olives that would have given off a nice fragrance on a late spring day like this.

  But there were few signs of much of that as Zac stood on the porch and surveyed the drab, dilapidated neighborhood. While a few people in the town had continued to do upkeep on their yards, most couldn’t find the time and energy when they were fighting every day for survival. It had been more than two years since the virus struck, and the world had shifted under their feet in what felt like the blink of an eye. Billions dead, civilization thrown back practically into the Stone Age, and it was these sorts of little things that Zac occasionally missed. He wanted that world back again. But if he couldn’t have it, he wanted to do what he could to make the one he was stuck in better, whatever that meant he had to do.

  The door swung open, and Zac turned in that direction.

  “Is it done?” he asked.

  William nodded. “Should work for what we need.”

  Zac glanced over both shoulders, grimacing.

  “We can’t do this shit on the front porch. Gonna invite me in?”

  “Didn’t realize you were gonna wait for an invite.” William stepped to the side and swung his arm toward the living room. Zac stepped in and sat on the red linen couch, and William settled into a leather recliner. Zac leaned forward and put his arms on the coffee table.

  “So, did he make it to the hospital?” Zac asked.

  “Sure. No problem.” William shrugged. “Benjamin dropped him off for us. If anyone saw him on the way, he was gonna say he found Hank on the sidewalk like that. Hank wasn’t doing too well when he left.”

  “You didn’t have to kill the guy. This wasn’t a hit.”

  William rolled his eyes. “When you tell me to beat the shit out of a guy, you get what you get, man. But Hank’s not gonna die. He’ll be fine. You were worse off than him, and you’re sitt
ing here talking to me right now.”

  “Yeah, well. I come from good stock.”

  “I’m sure that’s the explanation.”

  Zac laughed. William got up and began pacing the room.

  “So what’s next? What’s the plan from here? I put a guy in the hospital for you. Fine. I want to know how this helps us get back to the way things were. There’s still no Audrey. She’s gone.”

  William stopped talking and swallowed hard. “It’s not right the way she was done,” he finally said, his eyes fixed on the floor at his feet. “She wasn’t perfect. But who is? Show me a man who can say he never makes mistakes, and I’ll show you a fucking liar. What did they expect her to be? She’s human. Fucking sue her. But she was the best damn thing to happen to this town. Do you think any of us would even be alive without her stepping in and instilling order? The virus would have wiped out the lot of us. And now she’s the one who’s gone. It’s not fair.”

  Zac crossed his legs. “She earned a lot of that. Do you even know what all she did? I’ll admit, she did a lot for this town—good and bad—and people didn’t appreciate the good as much as maybe they should have. That’s why it’s time to right some wrongs. Let’s just say this is the beginning of that. But if she were standing in front of me right now, I’d still punch her in her fucking face.”

  William lifted his head, alarmed. “I know it’s complicated with you and her, but you’ve just gotta tell me something. I mean, I believe in what you’re saying, so I went through with this. Now you have a good reason to trust me. Give me a reason to trust you.”

  “Let me ask you a question,” Zac responded. “What do you think about Stephanie and Michael?”

  “They led the entire overthrow. I know they killed Paul. And, for all I know, they killed Audrey and dumped her body somewhere. They’re the reason we’re in the mess we’re in today. And, as far as I’m concerned, they should be run out of town.”