The Mysterious Stranger (The Confidence Game 3)

“When is doomsday? That’s what you want to know, right? You want to know so you can have a countdown.” Chuck’s hand came up and he scribbled in the air. “Write it on your little calendar and check off the days.”

The other men laughed. He could only play so dumb with this crew. If he looked too weak he’d become the one they dumped on. If he looked too strong, they’d resent him. Either way, being too deferential wasn’t going to help. “Yeah, all right. I do want to know.”

“It’s not a single day, it’s a time, an age, an eon and we’re already in it and every day the decay hastens. We have no time to lose getting our new world ready,” T

ed said.

“He means get back to work everyone,” Chuck added.

Zeke went back to the foundation he was digging. Did they see Orrin as a king? Did they genuinely see woman as tools to discard when you were done with them? Were they all okay about the idea that the cabins they were building were meant for slave laborers?

He stopped to adjust his glove when he realized he was bleeding into it from broken blisters, and when he looked up Mike and Orrin were standing there.

“You were right to want to know about doomsday, Zack.” Orrin motioned for Zeke to turn his hand over and inspected the torn skin. “There have been groups before ours who predicted a certain date. Those dates came and went and the groups floundered, broke up because they didn’t have enough clear sight to see what I do. I made a study of their madness. We know better and we’re stronger. Ready for the worst.”

Orrin Epcot was slicker than your average megalomaniac with an end of the world kink. “They were false prophets,” Zeke said.

“I’m not a prophet,” Orrin said sternly. “Don’t wander off out here. Get some ointment and bandage that hand up. Don’t want it to get infected.”

Orrin turned to leave, and Zeke called after him. He didn’t know how much access he’d get to the man, how many opportunities to push his own agenda. “I want to help protect us against outsiders.”

Orrin didn’t turn, but he didn’t walk on either. “Mike will have told you not to worry about that.” Confirmation Mike told Orrin everything that got said. Good to know.

“It doesn’t seem right that I don’t help.” The sooner he understood how armed this camp was the better.

Now Orrin turned to face him. “You’re helping now. Doing good work.”

“I worry about Rosie.”

“You don’t need to worry about anything here. Just doing a solid day’s work and finding a good woman to start the new generation with. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”

How long have you got? The thought put furrows between his eyes he felt pressing on his skull. “No, sir.”

That earned him a curt nod and Orrin left the campsite, not stopping to speak to anyone else. Zeke went in search of ointment and a bandage because a busted-up hand was one infection he could fight straight away.

Chapter Six

This was the fifth night Rory had stood in her corner of the kitchen doing nothing while dinner was prepared. It was at least the tenth time she’d tried to get Macy to speak to her without a conversation consisting of Rory saying, “Please let me do something,” and Macy saying some version of no.

One time, Macy even said, “You’re doing a great job staying out of my way. Keep it up.” All the eye-rolling.

It was the thousandth time she’d put her hand to her pocket for her phone.

The torture she’d imagined for Zeke was exactly the torment being visited on her. She was irrelevant. Worse, she was a public example of being useless. People stopped by her window to stare at her as if she was put there for educational purposes. She’d flinched the first time it happened. Now it happened so regularly she’d perfected a glare that made most of the rubberneckers react as if she’d reached through the glass and poked them. She would if she could.

Cadence had no wisdom for her but remained cheerfully upbeat about a better solution to her plight showing up out of nowhere, and positively fearful about any attempt to force a change. Cadence’s fear was worrying. Her belief that everyone’s best interests were being taken care of infuriating. Cadence’s certainly weren’t. She was in a dead-end job, with no prospects of a better life than the circumstances handed her. Except she thought she’d been saved.

Rory’s attempt to force a change had gotten her nowhere with the added aspect of having scared her breathless. After Macy’s keep it up comment, she’d marched into HQ determined to find someone in charge who could reassign her to literally any other job available. She’d clean toilets, pluck chickens. It was also a scouting expedition in search of the elusive signal jammer.

She’d been met with polite resistance, administrative fumbling, an offer to take her issue up the line, no visible evidence of anything remotely resembling a signal jammer, and Zeke’s suitcase sitting inside the open door of a storage cupboard that was slammed shut the moment it was clear she’d seen it.

All the concern she’d felt for him, the competing narrative of he can look out for himself versus where the heck is he, morphed instantaneously into a cold shock that made her limbs go stiff.

Cal had drilled into them both how dangerous cults could be. How they couldn’t ever think they understood everything going on, how the rules were likely to be inconsistent and change to suit the leader’s objectives. How friendships were unreliable and agendas confusing. His last words before the farewell party had been stick together.

“Where is my brother?” she’d asked the woman on the main desk. “Where is Zack?”

“He’ll be about the place. No need to worry.”