Showdown in the Economy of Good and Evil Read online

  Carl socked another of them, dropping him to his knees clutching his bleeding nose.

  The next thing that stood out about these men was the filth itself. One of the last things that happened in any processing was that new residents would receive a shower prior to entering the van that would bear them to the Farm. Folks typically showed up squeaky clean, often wearing new or at least laundered clothes. But these men were covered in grime and mud from greasy hair to weathered boots. They didn’t look like residents. They looked like caricatures of deviant homeless people.

  Even as a chicken squawk-flew past his ear, Carl socked another of them, but this particular goon returned with more gumption. His counterpunch landed on Carl’s collarbone, shooting pain down his shoulder but doing nothing to slow the old boxer’s rhythm. The return fire hit its mark squarely, and now this caricature of a deviant homeless person was down. This time, he had the sense to crawl away and find someone else to assault.

  His hands throbbing and his knuckles bleeding, Carl turned his attention to the center of the Circus. He saw that, helped by Laz, David, and even Meryl, he had managed to clear much of the threat from the northwestern portion of the Circus. The animals were still tear-assing all over the place, but the people had at least quit fighting in this little corner of the Farm. Justin and Evan had gone off to defend another side of the tent, but Carl couldn’t quite see through the chaos whether they were doing any good. The flow seemed to be heading toward them, as if the rioters had found a new target and moved as one to strike.

  That was when Carl rather lost his mind. He could cope with stampeding animals, damaged wares and storefronts, and even mildly injured residents, but he would die before he saw any harm fall upon Justin and Evan. They had pulled him up from the streets, given him a purpose, and provided a place where Carl could make a new and useful life for himself. So he sprinted through the crowd in the direction he had last seen them.

  He found Evan held in a headlock by a burly bruiser in brown overalls. This guy, too, was caked with grime and mud. Carl grabbed him by his greasy hair and socked him one, sending him flailing back into Aria’s salon chair. Evan scuttled off, ducking away from the fights all around him. Meanwhile, Aria leapt from behind a shelf stocked with haircare products, shrieking and brandishing scissors. She lunged at the bruiser in overalls with the pointy end of sheers, but the bruiser threw himself out of the chair and sidestepped her before she could bury the blade. Carl threw an arm around Aria’s belly from behind, holding her back.

  “You’ll kill him, Aria,” he said. “We don’t need that.”

  By now, Overalls had returned to his full height and brought his fists up by his jaw. The sight of him delivered flashbacks to boxing as a kid. Carl found that his muscle memory was very much on point. Just like riding a bike, he thought, ducking and weaving and socking Overalls in the ribs, one blow after the other. Overalls doubled over, and Carl socked him in the jaw. Overalls tumbled backward, dazed. He gazed up from the ground in wide-eyed surprise before scrambling off.

  “You taste me!” came the scream from Carl’s right. “You taste me bees!”

  Before Carl could get a handle on what the hell that meant, Prickly was yanking back the protective screen hemming his bees into his hive, and now on top of a riot and a stampede, they had a swarm. The attackers closest to Prickly possessed the sense to bolt, but all other people and animals raging within swarm-shot didn’t fare so lucky. Carl took three or four stings. The pain was enough to send him running as well. Moments later, every person and animal who’d been fighting or trampling under the tent was now fleeing in their own unique direction, swearing, duck-running, snorting, and swatting at their flesh with wild, jerky abandon.

  Carl ran a good thirty yards before it occurred to him that he had lost the bees. Breathless, his heart pounding from the adrenaline, he glanced to the north, where the farmhouse stood framed by a purpling sky. There was Nora, standing at the front door with her hand over her mouth. He’d have had a mind to go to her and make sure she and her dying father were all right, if not for the sudden presence of fire.

  The east end of the tent went up in flame so quickly that Carl had to believe someone had laid down an accelerant. Gas fires burned differently, he knew. He’d seen a few of them in his time on the streets, and beyond that, he’d come up on the stories about how his family had lost everything. Riots were one thing, but there was something deeper and so much more terrifying about a gas fire. Molotov cocktails had a way of amplifying the fear, gripping a man from the inside out, rendering him into a blithering little child.

  That was exactly how Carl ran, like a blithering little child. But then, another thirty yards later, a new thought occurred to him: the locals. Someone had to protect the locals. Most of them had fled, thank God, as soon as the chaos started. But Carl had spotted a dozen or so cowering in corners and under tables while the fighting and stampeding played out. What if they hadn’t found the courage to run before the fire went up?

  As Carl started back toward the tent, he pondered how he couldn’t relate to this specific brand of fear. The frozen cowering just made no sense to him. Fight or flight, right? Where did cowering fit into that instinct? How could it have possibly been evolutionarily advantageous for certain members of the species to hold perfectly still and sweat it out while rabid animals barreled into each other and wild-eyed people traded blows? And now that there was fucking fire raging all around them, would they finally have the good sense to run? Carl wasn’t sure, and so, against every impulse conditioned by his own evolutionary biology and the horrifying stories he had heard since he was a boy, he ran as fast as he could toward the fire.

  By the time he reached the tent, there was little to be done. The entire eastern side had collapsed inward, burying tables and wares and the accoutrements of thriving businesses in flame. The smoke churned black into the twilight. Screams rose from all corners of the tent. Carl’s heart stopped when he thought the screams had come from under the burning canvas. But then he spotted the ring of people surrounding the wreckage. Several of the locals he had seen had joined this ring, along with Aria and Prickly and a dozen other residents.

  “Is anyone still inside?” Carl hollered to them.

  Either no one heard him over the crackling fire and screaming animals, or they were all too paralyzed by fear to reply.

  Carl, spurred on by a courage he hadn’t known he possessed, entered the still standing western side of the tent. Under the hem of it, the heat was unimaginable. Here, Carl could see only the slumping canvas of the tent and the undamaged half of the Circus. The flame and smoke resided on the other side of the canvas, its heat surging through like a convection oven. Carl found no sign of anyone trapped under the wreckage, but the heat prevented him from taking another step farther. His head was spinning, his breath short. Vaguely, he could hear someone calling his name.

  “Carl! Carl, get out of there!”

  He couldn’t get out of there. Not until he could be sure everyone was safe. How many times had he heard the story of his grandmother? When the white militia torched Grandpa’s business in Greenwood, everyone had assumed that Grandma had already gone out on her daily run to the grocery store. Everyone had been so sorrowfully wrong.

  “Please, Carl!” He recognized the voice now. It was Evan. “You have to get—”

  Carl heard no more. There at the center of the tent, just beside the main support beam, he spotted an arm. It was pale and soot-strewn and limp, but he would recognize that nail polish anywhere. Against all instinct, he charged into the heat. A section of canvas exploded in flame directly to his right, forcing him to dodge back toward the tent’s hem. For a heartbeat, he knew doubt. But then he saw the hand move.

  “Meryl!” he hollered. “Hang on, Meryl!”

  Smoke billowed through the hole, the flames climbing above him now. He was encircled in fire, only one path out—and that was back the way he came. Three more steps and his hair began singeing from the heat. The pain
consumed him, the stench unbearable and strangely familiar. Two more steps and he was crouching over Meryl, the support beam cracking under the weight of the burning canvas.

  “Meryl,” he said, capable only of a whisper from the heat and smoke.

  The hand moved. The canvas had swallowed the rest of her, but she was still alive. Carl stooped, grasped the wrist with both of his beaten and bee-stung hands, and summoned all his remaining energy to pull.

  Crack!

  The support beam splintered, the upper half toppling away, sliding a fold of the tent down like a lash over Carl’s shoulders. It was unfathomably hot, searing his skin. Carl screamed, but still he pulled. For a breath, it felt like Meryl was too dug into the wreckage, but then, the moment he got her moving, the momentum built and soon she was sliding.

  The fire rose. The smoke choked his vision and made every breath feel like it was burning him from the inside out. But Meryl was up now, on her knees, her eyes open, hacking violently but alive. Carl threw her arm over his shoulder, jerked her around to the north, and hobbled her as quickly as he could toward the one remaining path to safety.

  Crack!

  The last of the beam crashed down, sending the canvas billowing in a searing hot wave. As they hobbled, the folds closed in from all directions in Carl’s peripheral vision, but that thin sliver of twilight and safety remained open ahead. One misstep and they would be swallowed.

  Three more steps and he was aware of the roar of shrieking voices all around. A great rumble of flame and destruction went up behind him, and now Carl was tumbling forward, taking Meryl with him. He did not know what happened next, for the heat swallowed him into exhaustion and nothingness.

  Chapter 22 Aftermath

  “Free Market” is broadly defined as having no government intervention in pricing, business regulations, tariffs, supply, and/or demand. The market is free from monopolies, authorities, the government, economic privilege, and artificial scarcity. It is a wonder that nobody has considered the effects of money itself being monopolized by banks.

  —Justin Wolfe

  In the confusion and fear, Evan didn’t notice her presence at first. He was too focused on checking whether Carl was alive. Meryl had coughed herself in half, but with Bob-O’s attentive care, she had remained conscious. She was sobbing now, crying out for Carl to be okay.

  Every other resident on the scene had joined them, wreathing them in. The shrill sirens of the nearby volunteer fire department could be heard screaming up the main drive. Down the hill, the fire only grew, but from what the others said, every resident and local was accounted for. They would have to wait until the fire was out to verify, but for now, it appeared that Meryl would have been the only casualty, if not for Carl’s heroics.

  “Please, Carl,” Evan said, his eyes brimming with tears.

  Justin knelt over Carl’s head and put an ear to his nose. “He’s breathing!” he said.

  Everyone sucked in a breath of relief.

  “Carl?” Evan said, patting him on the cheek with an open palm. His skin was so hot, his singed hair clung to his scalp from the sweat. He lay on his back, but even so, the bloom of his burned shoulders was evident. Evan wondered whether he should turn him over to avoid infection. But when he tried, he found that Carl was too heavy to roll, and he was too weak from worry to ask anyone to help him. “Carl, buddy, we need you to wake up.”

  Nothing.

  Now he could hear the crying start. All around him, men and women, residents and locals, were whimpering with sorrow and fury. Why had this happened? What could possibly have caused a riot in the Circus, let alone a fire that even now consumed everything? What had this Farm ever done to the world for that world to repay the favor with Carl’s life?

  “Carl!” Evan screamed.

  The whimpering became sobbing, and for Evan, the world started to spin. There was Justin, crying as well. And Nora—when did she get here?—all out of tears, her hand clutched over her mouth in despair. And there was. Jesus Christ. Was that Elliot goddamn Larson? What in holy hell was he doing here? At this critical moment? At this moment that he had no business being a part of?

  The sight of him filled Evan with so much rage that he stood, leaving Carl’s care to the others so he could bear down on Larson.

  “Funny coincidence seeing you here,” he seethed.

  Larson was so stunned by Evan’s change of mood that he took a step backward, going on the defensive.

  “What do you mean it’s a funny coincidence?”

  Evan kept bearing down on him until Larson bumped into the ring of residents and ran out of room to keep backing up. “Oh, I don’t know. We get a vanload of burly, supposedly homeless thugs from your intake facility, there’s a stampede, a riot breaks out, and you just happen to show up while the fire’s still burning?”

  Larson looked flustered. “Wait. What? No. Justin, tell him.”

  “Tell me what?” Evan snapped, firing a look of anger at Justin.

  “It’s true,” Justin said, still cradling Carl’s head in his hands. “He’s been here for, what, two days now?”

  “Doing what exactly? Letting our starving animals out to rampage for food?”

  “Helping,” Larson corrected. He threw his hands up in defense when Evan wheeled around on him. “I don’t mean any harm, really. It’s just that Justin told me about the harvest problem, so I came in with some new prototype robots to help fortify the soil for the next planting and some drones to survey the—”

  “Drones?” Evan barked. Even now, he could hear them whirring all around the fields. It was a strangely familiar whir. Where had he heard it before? “Everything about this Farm is collapsing, in no small part due to your constant stream of new residents we’re not prepared for, and your solution is fucking drones?”

  “They’ve been dumping a phosphate fertilizer,” Larson said. “It’s the same chemical those firefighting helicopters use with forest fires.” His eyes widened as if this thought had just occurred to him. “It’s a fire retardant! If you give me a minute, I could recalibrate the drones to fight the fire.”

  Evan glared holes through him. He looked back at him like he didn’t know whether Evan meant to hug him or take a swing. He was frozen. Evan had never made another man freeze in this way. He didn’t know how to behave in this circumstance. He felt like a deer in the headlights himself.

  “What. The. Fuck. Are you. Waiting for?” Evan seethed.

  Larson performed a jaunty little gallop toward the flaming Circus tent and started punching things into his phone. Vaguely aware of the coughing and awing happening behind him, Evan watched transfixed as the many dozens of drones barely visible in the twilit sky turned as one and glided toward the wreckage. It might have been a glorious relief of a sight if it hadn’t also looked so damned ominous—one man standing on a hill with a little cell phone, commanding an army of drones like they were his own personal flying monkeys.

  “Carl!” someone shrieked.

  Evan wheeled around. Carl’s eyes were open, and he had sat up. Everyone backed up to give him space, but Nora dove in and hugged him. The hug lasted only a second before Carl howled in pain and Nora lurched back, hating herself for not noticing Carl’s burns. The skin over Carl’s shoulders looked like French toast, but he was alive. Evan had to fight back the urge to hug him as well.

  This was when the firetrucks arrived. The volunteers poured out of the trucks and immediately got to work, all of them with wondering eyes on the sky and the surreal drone concert working over the fire. Evan ran toward them, shouting for an ambulance.

  ~~~

  It took more doing than Evan wanted to wrap his weary mind around in the moment, but David, Laz, and the farmhands had finally gotten the stampede under control and ushered the majority of the starving animals back to their pens. People were still talking about the mystery of how all those pens had somehow simultaneously broken open, letting every living creature on the Farm into the night to forage for food. Then there was the matt
er of why they had been doing the foraging so aggressively. According to Laz, starving animals could get agitated, sure, but a full-on stampede like that couldn’t have been spontaneous.

  Something had spooked them into action.

  Anyway, there would be time enough to think about that later. At the moment, Evan was too busy buzzing with worry about Carl, anxiety about all this wreckage surrounding him, and sorrow for the poor residents and locals who’d been forced to endure this nightmare. The stampede and riots had been enough, but the police hadn’t helped matters, either. Now that he thought on it, Evan realized it was no small feat that the farmhands had managed to get the animals back under control even as the police started dispersing the crowds with tear gas.

  Laz was the first to come to Evan with the story that no one wanted to tell the police. There had been something of a buzz floating around the residents, but no one wanted to talk. The stampede had started the riot in the Circus, but none of that accounted for the damage turning up elsewhere on the Farm.

  “The protestors did the barracks and the classroom,” Laz said, his hand on Evan’s shoulder as he spoke softly into his ear, “but I’m telling you, it was residents who destroyed the windmill.”

  Evan looked sadly at the debris surrounding one of his greatest sources of pride. He had grown up in an outdoorsman’s home, had learned to fish and to shoot and to camp. But his father had never been much of a handyman, and so Evan had never built anything in his life. But alongside Justin Wolfe, his mentor, employer, and friend, he had rebuilt this beautiful windmill. With his own two hands, he had helped create something that could power a whole community, could make everyone’s lives easier, and could contribute to rewriting the future.

  Now that windmill lay in ruin. It looked as if someone had climbed the ladder and ripped out most of the essential components that fed the generator. Somehow, they had managed to grind the blades to a halt. Then, they had started in on them with a sledgehammer. One of the blades was badly wrenched, while another had fallen off entirely, the point of the massive thing buried in the earth at the structure’s feet.