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

25

Troy had been living in the wilderness for close to two weeks, but he had not acclimated. As lord of order, he had always deferred to Santonio Ford as soon as brick and mortar gave way to trees and thicket and swamp. Everyone knew Troublers built houses on stilts and hummocks, that they fished and frog-gigged and trapped, that they somehow fended off disease-ridden bugs and vermin, mosquitoes you could see from ten yards, and nutria big enough to saddle and ride. He had assumed the heathens had a communication protocol—familial units, small paramilitary cells, individuals who seldom saw their nearest neighbors, larger settlements nestled deep in the wilderness, all of them planning and acting in concert—but he had seldom considered the ingenuity required to maintain it, despite the shifting waterways and soil erosion.

Since the bridge, he had learned of Troubler nests in the city, of other outposts in the woods and swamps and small towns around New Orleans, of a worldwide network moving slowly but efficiently from hamlet to town to major city to outlying swamp or wood. He now knew enough to dumbfound any lord of order, enough to understand the Troublers’ true threat for the first time. The Crusader still stubbornly clinging to life inside him shuddered whenever he considered the scope and efficacy of their operation. If he had discovered it all before Dwyer, before Royster and Rook’s orders and the river bridge and his own dawning horror at what the Crusade had become, would he have welcomed the chance to remove so many Troublers, his lifelong enemies, from the field at any cost? Would this knowledge have been enough to silence his conscience? Would he have let New Orleans drown?

That’s fear talkin, not righteousness, Troy thought. Lord, keep me on your path, even when I’m scared.

Moving across the water, past safe houses and pickets, he had seen many familiar faces, Crusaders he had passed every day on the streets before Royster’s arrival. Single men here, two or three women there, whole families bearing bags of heirlooms and bladed weapons and clubs, most of them shocked to see him, all of them happy. As if his presence eased their fears about their own souls.

They were all under guard, but they were being fed and sheltered. Better treatment than those chained wretches in the city, by far.

They seen what was comin and ran. Didn’t even have to be turned. The Crusade did the Troublers’ work.

Troy sat on the porch of the cabin they had given him after he and Stransky completed that long canoe ride through the bayous, a hip-deep slog through bogs too overgrown for boats, a mosquito-laden walk up the high hill on which the cabin sat. His right leg, still stiff, was propped in front of him, the calf and foot resting on an old, rotting chair. The shack overlooked the Irish Bayou Lagoon. Down by the water, a handful of gators sunned themselves on shore. One of them had to be ten feet long. It lay with its mouth wide open, as if waiting for some fool to come along and stick his head in. The heat felt like a malignant presence, despite the shade trees. If a hurricane hits this place just right, them trees will smash this cabin into kindling. But no one had asked his opinion. Since leaving the sisters’, he had subsisted on tasty swamp gumbo the Troublers brought him, on fire-grilled fish, on frog legs and fried gator, on tough bird flesh gamey enough to get up and fly away, and on vegetables grown in the swamps or smuggled out of the city.

Most of the Troublers still watched him as if he might at any moment reach into his back pocket and pull out a fully armed column of raiders.

Ragtag, dirty, and courageous, they saw themselves as freedom fighters. Yet they had more in common with the typical Crusader than either side would have admitted. Except for the Crusade’s higher-ups, who lived in the rarified air of their privilege, folks on both sides went to work and helped their neighbors and tried to make it through the day without getting shot. Many of these Troublers even followed a kind of Christianity, just as Stransky and Sister Sarah had claimed. They did not believe in the righteousness of Jonas Strickland or Matthew Rook or any of the Crusade leaders in between, but most believed in God and followed a code. Their long generations had lived with the kind of contradictions Troy and his people had only recently discovered. Still, it was hard not to think of them as enemies, especially the more sardonic, haughty ones who spat when they saw him. Stransky had tried to mend fences, but even she could only do so much. After all, Troy had been stalking, imprisoning, and killing Troublers for years.

Today, he and Stransky were scheduled to sneak into the city near the old St. John the Baptist airport, where some of the buildings, smashed flat or burned to cinders in the Crusade’s great origin, had never been rebuilt. The streets were still pockmarked with craters, though the wrecks themselves had long since been dismantled and melted down, the burnable refuse torched. Those grounds served as the city dump, with a crumbling tower overlooking a landscape ruled by rats and carrion birds. Its circumference bulged like a glutton’s waistline. Troy had planned to shift the dump into parts of the wetlands known for the heaviest Troubler activity. Poison the land, kill the vermin. He had wanted to raze the airfield and sod it and plant trees that would eventually shelter game. Now he wondered at his folly. As if every spot on God’s Earth wanted only the right man to defile it. As if killing one’s enemies somehow negated the ruination of what should be sacral and pure.

After reaching the cabin that day, Stransky had told him of underground caches near