Lord of Order by Brett Riley (the reading list book TXT) 📕

Beyond the crops, stands of trees sheltered deer, raccoon, nutria, squirrel, sometimes even alligators that wandered from their watery haunts. Ford spent more time in this park than anywhere else, but he had hardly seen it since Royster’s arrival. Today, several of his subordinates had spread blankets on the ground and were eating their lunches. No one looked happy. Few talked. Ford moved among them, waving them off before they could rise and salute. Someone handed him a plate of grilled beef, shrimp, and peppers and onions sautéed in beef fat, served over white rice. If he had shown up on a different day or time, he might have gotten a po’ boy or a steaming bowl of gumbo or jambalaya. His cooks were the best in the world. Today, though, he barely registered the taste.

Quintus Vacla, the foreman, had not appeared. Odd. Vacla had spent every day of his working life plowing or reaping or picking a field, stowing food in barns, trapping prey in the woods. He had never taken a sick day. His sinewy limbs and solid torso seemed crafted for outdoor work in all weathers. He had trailed behind the plow horse despite a high fever, had checked his traps while a hurricane’s outer edge kissed the city. His absence gave the place a truncated look, an arm with no hand.

Carol Mellichamp passed by and saluted. Ford grabbed her sleeve. You seen Quintus today?

Her brow furrowed. No. I figured he finally took sick. Should I worry?

I hope not.

No one else had seen Vacla either.

Altogether, Ford’s hunter/gatherers constituted perhaps a fifth of New Orleans’s population. They fed the city, guarded the crops from scavengers and Troublers, and controlled the local animal populations. As the park’s foreman, Vacla’s responsibilities were enormous. He would not abandon them.

A seed of dread took root in Ford’s belly.

He ran to Rachel, the black mare with gray socks. He unhitched her, mounted up, and spurred her out of the park, riding hard for Vacla’s house.

The yard was a tiny patch of green fronting an unpainted wooden house. Vacla had planted tulips and gardenias and honeysuckle bushes and verbena. Green vines wound about crude rusted metal columns holding up the porch overhang. A few years back, Vacla had moved in with his bride, a woman whose name Ford could no longer remember. Vacla never spoke of her. She died of fever a year into the marriage, taking with her the unborn child that would have been their first. Vacla never remarried or showed any inclination to start another family. He lived for his memories and his crops.

The front door was wide open. Someone had broken the latch. The dusty boot print near the knob told the story.

That seed of dread began to bloom. Ford drew one of his six-guns, cocked it, and went inside.

A chair and side table lay splintered on the wood floor. Broken lamps had spilled their oil everywhere. If someone had come along and tossed a lit match through the door, the whole place would have burned down in minutes. Ford followed the destruction—kitchen implements scattered, the bathroom basin crushed to powder—until he reached Vacla’s bedroom, where he found bedclothes tossed about and blood spattered on the far wall, near the door leading to thirty square feet of back yard. Quintus keeps his rain barrel back there, a storage shed full of tools, a little grill. Ford opened the door and went outside. The grass had been trampled, the grill overturned, half-burnt wood chips and ashes scattered from its mouth. A blood trail led around the house and onto the street. Ford dragged Rachel away from Vacla’s foliage, mounted up, and followed the blood, even though he knew where it was heading.

The trail, a scattering of droplets at three- or four-foot intervals, ended a few miles later on Airline Highway, which merged nearby with the Pontchartrain Expressway and headed southeast. Hell and damnation. I knew it. They took him across the river, probably to that interrogation center. Ford had asked Gordy Boudreaux about the place once, and Boudreaux had only stared at him for a moment and walked away. Ford had never been sure what that meant. Boudreaux had always been the most softhearted among them. He ate mostly vegetables, accepting a steak or a chop or a fish only once or twice a week. He scooted spiders outdoors instead of stepping on them and left food for strays on his walk. His job as a deputy lord might have seemed like a contradiction if it had not been for his faith in the righteousness of their cause, the belief that the Troublers threatened God’s plan and that, if no other recourse existed, their deaths were just. But in these troubled times, a man like Boudreaux might have seen, perhaps even done, something that rattled him beyond repair.

Ford took the expressway, passing the great ruined dome of the ancients and noting places where the road needed repairs, if they should live so long. Reaching the base and getting Vacla out alive seemed impossible. He could not ride in with a better-armed force like he had always done with Troublers. For all he knew, the outlanders would shoot him on sight, if he even managed to cross the river in the first place.

Starving, stinking prisoners clustered everywhere, so many that, in places, Rachel could barely pass. The bridge loomed in the distance. The sun still sailed high and would for a few more hours. Its rays sparkled on the great river’s eddies and backlit the buildings across the water.

Will it make any difference if I wait till dark?

If he tried, he would need a place to lay low, but nothing nearby seemed promising. People occupied the houses. Most of the other buildings had been converted to food storage, bunkhouses for river workers, warehouses full of fishing equipment. Those unrestored since the old times and those flattened by hurricanes provided no cover.

There’s that place a few streets