Legion of Despair: Book Three in The Borrowed World Series by Franklin Horton Read Free Book Online Page B

father was sentenced to twenty years and sent to the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond. Buddy was less than a year old at the time and had vague childhood memories of visiting his father there. Buddy’s mother kept The Yellow House running in her husband’s absence, hiring various folks over the years to fill positions.
    One night, shortly after Buddy’s father had been convicted and sent away, the trooper that had arrested him came into The Yellow House and sat right at the bar in front of Buddy’s mother. She held no ill-will against the man; he’d just been doing his job.
    The man placed a brown paper bag onto the bar top and slid it across.
    “What’s that?” Buddy’s mother asked.
    The man nodded toward it. Buddy’s mother hooked a finger in the opening and tipped the bag toward her, leaning over to peer in. Inside, she saw the Colt .25 automatic.
    “With the trial over with, we won’t be needing that anymore,” the trooper said in a gesture that would seem quite alien in this day and time. “But if you’re going to keep this place open, you might need it.”
    When Buddy’s father was released after ten years for good behavior, The Yellow House was still open and waiting on him. He worked that bar until he died of a heart attack in 1977.
    Buddy still had the gun his father had used to kill that man. In his family, the act had never been portrayed as murder. There were just certain actions that a person took in life that brought about a particular set of consequences. The rules of this were as set in stone as sums in arithmetic. A math problem only has one answer, as do some problems in this world. When that drunk laid his hands on Buddy’s mother, he set in place an unavoidable consequence, given the times, the region, and the man whose wife he’d touched. It was the natural world at work. There was only one answer.
    The same had been done when that man drove off in his teal Camaro with Rachel and had not brought her home safely. There were unavoidable consequences. Buddy had no other course of action available to him. If the world was collapsing around him anyway, that would just make it easier for Buddy to do what he needed to do.
     

Chapter 4
     
    Gary’s House
    Richlands, VA
     
    When the morning sky began to show the first signs of graying, Gary felt a little better. He’d stayed on high alert for the remainder of the night, trying to maintain a watch on his home and hoping that his sons-in-law were doing the same at their homes. He’d been stupid to not send them home with radios. He’d thought that formalizing their security measures could wait another day, and found it wasn’t the case. If he wasn’t careful, his stupidity was going to get someone killed.
    His family didn’t even know about the worst part of the night yet. They were not aware of the mangled body still in his driveway. The big question that hung over Gary’s head was to understand why these people did what they did. He was sure it was a decoy maneuver of some kind and he’d fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. More stupidity on his part. Now that morning was coming and he could see without a light, he had to find out what the riders had done while he was distracted. Surely they didn’t just tie a body under his vehicle for laughs. If that was the case, they were a higher caliber of scumbag than he’d been expecting.
    Armed with his AR and his pistol, Gary checked the garage first. Karen’s Jetta was parked at the side of the house and the door that led to the garage wasn’t visible from there. While he’d been occupied with that body last night, someone could have pried open the deadbolt and had access to their fuel and other emergency preparations. When he checked, he found no indication of this, though; no signs of forced entry.
    He went to his outbuildings next. Although Will had said he’d emptied them of all the important supplies, the riders would most likely not have known this. They may still have