“If that’s the case, their belief is touching. I’ll be surprised if we get rid of them in my lifetime.”
Originally when the government had formed the Department of Empowered Affairs, they predicted less than twenty of the mutants existed, and they’d be apprehended within five years. Thirty-one years and one hundred and forty-two captures later, some still evaded the authorities. But not many. So few existed now that, most of the time, Enzo did regular police work.
Schmitt pursed his lips at the idea. “We’ll eradicate them. This country won’t be able to return to normal until we do.”
“Maybe the harvesters just knew what they were doing,” Enzo said. “My mother’s people lived off the land and read the weather long before meteorologists posted ten-day forecasts.How much do you want to bet the group has a Native American guy working for them? Have you checked that?”
“We tried to track the Sunshine Co-Op, but with harvesters, it’s never an easy task. After we began looking into them, the whole group disappeared. No more recorded hirings or purchases. Then last summer, Mr. Napier told us the same people came back to his farm in search of work, only they called themselves the Here and Done Co-Op. Napier recognized them because one of the workers is a young blonde woman, and he liked watching her work.”
“Ah, a source who is observant and lonely.”
“I can see no benefit to changing a co-op’s name except to throw off an agency that started keeping track of them.”
“Or maybe,” Enzo suggested, “they talked to someone who knew about marketing and realized that Sunshine Co-Op was a stupid name. Absolutely no branding. Could be a group selling sunscreen or lawnmowers.”
“We figured Here and Done would be in the Fayette area next, so we sent people to the market to wait for them. We wanted to question a few. They stopped going to that market. When we checked with the nearby farming compounds, we found out they had taken their wages early and moved to Missouri. They claimed some of their people had business to attend to there.”
Schmitt tapped the papers on his desk. “That’s the problem with harvesters. They come and go. Farmers are supposed to require ID, but they look the other way, barter for goods as partial payment, and give the rest under the table.”
Enzo nodded. Regulating country folk had always been a problem.
“We’re not positive,” Schmitt said, “but we think we’ve located them under a new name. Three weeks ago, theNightshade slavers attacked a marketplace a couple of hours southwest from here.”
The Nightshades were one of the worst raider gangs in Kansas and apparently getting bolder. They’d taken on an entire marketplace?
“The market’s security saw them coming, but the Nightshades had somehow gotten ahold of heavy ammo. The security team held them off for long enough to evacuate everyone. Unfortunately, the sellers had to leave quite a bit behind, and the Nightshades killed four of the security team in the process.”
“Scrappers,” Enzo muttered.
“The Nightshades left eight of their men and a dozen slaves at the market to load the supplies. What do you suppose happened next?”
“Probably more theft and slavery.”
Schmitt smiled, enjoying being the narrator of this story. “A group of ex-captive refugees arrived in Kansas City, and they gave us interesting intel about what happened after that.” He shuffled his papers back into his folder and pulled out three photos. “Slavers captured these harvesters when they came in to trade. The three were disarmed, and one was shot in the hand. The slavers even uploaded their pictures on the dark market slave site.”
He slid the photos over to Enzo.
Enzo hated looking at these sorts of images. He’d seen too many of them. Fear and hopelessness always radiated in the captives’ eyes. There just weren’t enough police officers in the country to keep up with the slave market or the trafficking. Enzo’s gaze stayed on the director.
“None of the sources saw what happened,” Schmitt said. “They heard an explosion behind a tent, then gunshots, and within minutes, three hick farm kids had killed so many slaversthat the remaining two got in a truck and fled rather than fight them. No one knows how the three harvesters managed to escape and kill that many slavers. The harvesters wouldn’t talk to the captives about it.”
Quite the surprise ending. Enzo picked up the pictures. What sort of people took on armed slavers and won? The first photo showed a blond man in his twenties with a clenched jaw and a smear of blood on his cheek. His blue eyes squinted in pain and anger.
A Latina woman scowled in the second photo. Fire was in her eyes, and a snarl perched on her lips. Fighters by nature. And despite what the director thought about hick farm kids, anyone who’d ever been around harvesters knew they were half muscle.
The third was a beautiful blonde woman whose blue eyes, wide with shock, had an innocent look to them. She made him think of a deer. Something graceful and incapable of violence.
He stared at her picture for a moment longer before returning the picture to the table. “Let me guess, our farmer with too much time on his hands and a thing for blondes, IDed these three as belonging to the Sunshine, Here and Done, whatever name they’re using now, land workers co-op?”
The director took the pictures and slid them back into the file. “He did. Tell me how three unarmed people managed to defeat a group of slavers and drive off with two trucks filled with their stuff?”
Enzo shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like the work of a psychic. If anything, one of them is a telekinetic and turned the raiders’ weapons on them.” And for once, he didn’t hate a telekinetic.
Schmitt nodded. “That’s a possibility. Wouldn’t be the first time two outlaws worked together. We don’t know what’s going on with this group, but I want to find out.”
Enzo straightened. This conversation had changed from the suspicions of the director to an actual mission where he’d have to go up against Empowereds by himself.
Man, the director wasn’t nearly as worried about telling Enzo’s mother of his death as he’d professed. “Ok, if a couple of Empowereds teamed up and are living incognito among farmworkers, how am I supposed to go undercover and fool the psychic for even one second?”