Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25

Chapter 25

Plan B was the only option, or so the President thought.  Revolution was spreading like a prairie fire.  Resistance was metastasizing as cells found each other, linked up and exchanged information and material.  It was getting beyond the scope of the establishment to control and subdue and if there’s one thing the establishment dislikes it is losing control.  There have never been limits on what established orders will do to maintain their power— and this played itself out even in America.  Things never change. 

The ‘collateral damage’ inflicted by the Domestic Security Force was being broadcast to the rest of the world.  Images of tanks and armored personal carriers rolling through Beaver Cleaver neighborhoods, demolishing houses and cars, troops in black kicking in doors and opening fire on so-called domestic combatants, were spreading virally worldwide. 

The anxiety in the governmental ranks turned to outright to panic after the Department of Homeland Security threw the internet kill switch.  The security measure which was authorized in a military spending bill so that the so-called conservative republicans would approve.  The establishment managed to regain control of the information…for a whopping twelve hours.  But a spontaneous order of thousands of computer hackers launched assaults on the government and their corporate shills, blowing their firewalls apart (virtually), and infecting and destroying the servers of all collaborators.  They erased everything.   

The truth was rerouted over phone lines and radios.  The pictures of the dead, the burned and bloated, the sounds of rage and grief flowed again, blowing through the filters and the cell phone censors.  No establishment can maintain ‘control’ without propaganda lies.  The truth is anathema to tyranny.  The Gordion Knot of established order was being cut through by the truth.     

China condemned America before the U.N.  Then Russia.  Then Iran piled on. 

“Stay out of our affairs,” snapped the President’s Grand Vizier, otherwise known as the Secretary of State.  “The United States is a sovereign nation and has a right, and more importantly, a humanitarian obligation to restore peace and security.  We reserve the right to restore order by whatever means necessary.” 

Washington DC stood nearly alone, wobbling, supported internationally only by the U.K. fascists on one arm and the Israeli fascists on the other.  The Prime Minister affirmed the United Kingdom’s support of their ‘special friend’ and in their deploying “whatever means necessary” to restore “Anglo-Saxon hegemony”.  Israel, increasingly isolated, simply reminded their baying wolf neighbors that they were quite ready to use their nukes to defend themselves if necessary.  Canada and Mexico closed their borders. 

A million people demonstrated in DC in the weeks following the Civic Center Park Massacre.  But MRAPS and storm troopers in black body armor and shields rolled in and dispersed them as well.  But this worked against the state as the big demonstrations diffused into millions of small ones. 

The implosion spread worldwide, emboldening partisans in the farthest corners of the rapidly disintegrating American empire.  The ranks of the Jihadis swelled.  Already dangerously undermanned as troops were siphoned off to restore order in the U.S., American supply convoys were ruthlessly attacked.  Airbases were overrun.  Remote units were cut off from food and water and ammunition.  A U.S. firebase in Shariastan was encircled and forced to surrender.  It was division strength, the worst U.S. military defeat in sixty years, an unmitigated military disaster.  The Army Colonel offered his life in exchange for giving quarter to his men.  He was behedded and the video feed was sent out into the world.  The empire was utterly finished.    

The humiliated President never left Air Force One, flying in continental figure-eights, flanked by fighters for four days at a time and refueling mid-air.  He ruled in absentia, like one of those deposed tin pot despots.  Things never change. 

What will my legacy be?  He pondered.  Will I be remembered as the Nero who lost America?  The mere thought of posterity crippled his reason.  He decided he had to take drastic action to save the established order. 

He prayed. 

He envisioned the first Savior of the Republic, the log cabin god from Illinois, with his stove pipe hat and his sunken jowls, reaching down from heavens and placing his boney hand on the contemporary President’s shoulder.  Give me the wisdom of Lincoln, the President prayed.  The ‘wisdom’ came to him like a bullet to the back of the head.  After a hastily arranged Cabinet meeting of his yes men it was unanimously decided.

America’s second Civil War was not going according to the 1861 playbook.  There was no ‘militia’ to confront and subdue with supreme military force.  There were no battalions of men in gray wool, aligning themselves in files to be annihilated by Union cluster bombs.  This revolution was everywhere, simultaneous, faceless.  Civil disobedience froze the transportation systems and choked off the highways.  Rogues fired shoulder held missiles at police and military helicopters.  Where did they get them?  Those evil Chinese bastards!  Banker computer systems were hacked and the bank accounts of executives who were running things from Costa Rica were drained only to be replenished the next day by government keystroke entry.  The prisons erupted.  Communities began arranging their own security and black markets.   

The DC establishment, embodied in human form by the god-pharaoh President, had one last desperate plan to restore the Federalist order.  The citizenry had to be shocked-and-awed into turning against the domestic rebellion.  When the Attorney General of Colorado, who was the highest ranking officeholder remaining in the state, demanded that all Colorado National Guardsmen return home, that was all the pretext that the progressive President needed to implement ‘Plan B’.

It was a comparatively small neutron bomb by military standards.  It was detonated low in the atmosphere so as to contain the arc of the electromagnetic pulse.  The concussion, nevertheless, flattened several square miles of an industrial section south of Denver.  Thousands of civilians were eviscerated or badly burned or blinded by the explosion.  It was unfortunate ‘collateral damage’ but utterly necessary in lieu of the dire circumstances.  Think of how many lives would be saved in the long run, was the excuse.     

The bomb achieved its goal with the radio-flash instantly frying the circuitry of anything receiving a current or not well-grounded.  All the running automobiles stalled with their electronics cooked.  A half million cars would never be started again.  The streetlamps all went dark.  Home computers and televisions and phones and radios went off.  The power surge melted a good portion of the grid.  Electricity was gone.  In an instant, it truly had become 1861 once again— Denver was Atlanta after the vainglorious Sherman punitively burned it to the ground.  The message was sent loud and clear to the rest of the country and to the world: Respect our authority or there will be dire consequences.

The fires raged for two days.  There was no water to put them out.  Vaughn’s mother kept watch over the night from her window as the twenty foot flames engulfed and annihilated a nearby school in only a few minutes.  The fire trucks just roared past it, their eerie sirens descending into the smoke.  They had other destinations and other things to save that night. 

Something told Vaughn’s mother that it was time to go.  She gathered Jessica and little Brooke and they headed north walking down the middle of the ten lane I25.  The night was illuminated in orange by the fires and permeated by the invisible roar of fighter jets and the thumping of helicopters in the sky above.  They walked in clusters of a dozen or so.  Thousands and thousands of silent refugees moving, escaping… surviving. 

Ten miles they walked that night in the wailing fire glow until they reached her ex-husband’s house.  He took them in and they boiled water in a pit in his suburban backyard. It was the longest night of their lives until the next one, and then the next one after that.  But they would survive.

On the morning of the third day, a patrol of Humvees left Camp Anubis.  Their orders were to liberate the Jefferson Country police station in Evergreen that had been taken over from the Feds by its own deputies. 

The mechanized unit worked its way down Sante Fe Boulevard, right into the neutron carnage that was once known as Englewood.  Their Geiger counters crackled as they motored through the stalled autos and the crumbled warehouses and past a still burning commuter train which rested on rails curled up like Christmas ribbon.  

A heavy soot cloud blanketed the sky and occasional snow flakes (or was it ashes) floated down as they advanced in that cold morning.  The column of eight vehicles turned onto Hampden and rolled west.  The soldiers were given assurances that the radiation levels were benign.  They were inoculated just to be safe, with doses of ‘Antirad’ which was manufactured by Dow who scored the exclusive and lucrative military contract.  Never mind the side effects or if it even worked.  Even if the place was radioactive and the ‘Antirad’ was really just a trillion dollar placebo, the fine soldiers of the Domestic Security Force, many of them new recruits filling the cavernous void of defections, were fully prepared to follow any order.

The urban Hampden Avenue morphed into the mountainous 285 and the patrol lumbered upwards into the wooded foothills.  They had to go this route as intelligence reports indicated that the road up through Idledale had sloughed off in an avalanche and was impassable.  They turned off onto a two lane road and kept on.  The convoy’s diesels rumbled slowly around the snaking, narrow road, the walls steepening on either side.  The Master Sergeant cursed the other drivers to keep them from bunching up.

“God damn idiots!” He screamed in his radio.

He urged the young lieutenant to reconsider the route.  They could loop around one of the tendril roads, head back out to the highway, and come back in up CR 73 which was not so snaking and canyon-like.  The Ivy League know-it-all lieutenant refused.  Military intelligence reported that CR 73 was littered with IEDs. 

Not knowing what you don’t know is chronic in youth.  Young, arrogant officers often refuse the knowledge of their seasoned NCOs.  Things never change.

The lead Humvee immediately stopped as it wound around a bend and the convoy coiled up behind it sending the sergeant into a rage.   The way was blocked by a three car wreck.  Apparently they had collided a moment after the radio-flash had seized their engines and locked up their brakes. 

The armored DSF vehicles idled under the ponderosa pines and the overcast skies on the narrow canyon road.  A cold breeze blew through the pines.

A DSF soldier in freshly procured black camouflage and gas mask exited the first Humvee and carefully approached one of the cars.  He found a driver slumped over the wheel.  He reached in, grabbed him by the hair and pulled him upright.  The man’s face was pale but he looked like that actor guy.  A glimmer caught the soldier’s eye.  It was from the man’s wrist.  The soldier reached down and pulled off a shiny watch. 

“Movado!” He proclaimed.  “Very nice.”  He tucked it into his breast pocket.

As he stepped back from the car, a sense of uneasiness shot through him.  Something was out of place.  What’s wrong, here?  He drew his rifle and scanned the trees.  The branches swayed gently in the wind.  Nothing there.  No movement.  No shiny reflections.  No geometric shadows.  He looked up into the featureless gray heavens.  He watched as a black crow flew by overhead and disappear behind the tree tops.  There would be no air cover, today.  Flakes of ash (or was it snow) fell down. 

He scanned the cars. 

The cars! 

Yes!  The car before him was the only one with a driver in it.  That seemed unusual.  Maybe the others were too hurt to help the poor bastard out, he thought.  He checked the damages and crumple zones of the wrecks.  But the crumple zones in the fenders did not align with their collision points.  They were pushed there! 

Fuck! 

“Something’s wrong,” he whispered in his radio.  “We need to get turned around.”  He started to back towards his Humvee which was a lumbering chore in all the radioactive mitigation gear that he was wearing.  He expected the zips of bullets at any moment.  He caught a glimpse of a shadow within the shadows.  It was motion in the woods.

“Turn around!  Turn around!”  He shouted.  But there was no room to do it.  They would have to back up.  The Humvees lurched into reverse.  Their bunching up, which was a function of their arrogance and lack of experience, made the exercise a complete cluster fuck.  The rear Humvee at first tried to back into the nearest turnout and whip around but this jammed all the other vehicles up.  The sergeant hopped out and started flailing about in an effort to coordinate the retreat.  The point man hopped back into his Humvee, yanked off his gas mask and pointed his rifle out the window. 

“Get ready,” he informed the driver.

“Oh, lighten up,” replied the driver.  “There ain’t no one out here with the balls to attack us.”

The rear Humvee whined as it backed up a full fifty yards into another turnout.  It shifted into drive just when the IED, triggered by sniper fire, went off, knocking the armored truck ten feet into the air.  Fireballs blasted out from its windows as it flipped rear over front, landing on its top, blocking the escape route.  The remaining seven Humvees were trapped and a turkey shoot ensued.  The trees came alive with muzzle flash.  Bullets and rocket propelled grenades and white phosphorous reigned in on the convoy from the highpoints on either side.  Within twenty seconds, all of the 50 caliber gunners were dead.  The patrol’s Ivy League lieutenant radioed frantically for air support.  It would take at least fifteen minutes to get there.  The cloud cover would make air support a tricky operation.  They would all be dead by then, anyway.

Five more IEDs exploded, knocking two more of the Humvees off their wheels.  The point man cajoled the driver to step on the gas and run through the barricade of mangled cars.  It was their only chance to survive.  The truck lurched forward, then tore straight ahead into the wreckage where it bounced into the air and onto the top of the dead watchman’s smashed car.  But it did not quite make it over the top.  It was high-centered at a forty five degree angle with its four wheels spinning a hundred miles per hour with no surface to grip and its doors sealed shut by the wreckage. 

In a panic, the three surviving DSF inside fired wildly outwards in all directions.  If they could only hang on for a few moments…hang on until the cavalry arrived.  But it was not to be.  Two phosphorus grenades exploded in the cab and all the soldiers trapped inside were cooked into charcoal within seconds.

It was over. 

The partisans came down out of the trees to gather up what they could.  Three or four more shots rang out which were either euthanizing bullets or ammunition exploding in the intense heat of the fires.  The helicopters approached frantically from the east, chopping up the gray sky with their rotors.  They knew they were too late.  Instead, it was time for payback on some DoCom traitors and they were going to kill anything that moved down in that canyon.

“Move, move!” ordered their captain.

A dozen men in ponchos converged on the burning Humvees.  They had thirty seconds to grab whatever was left of any use: ammo, guns, diesel, tools.  They stripped the Humvees and dead soldiers clean with military efficiency.  Then they disappeared, exfiltrating into the forest as the air cavalry approached. 

One of those partisans was Jimmy Marzan and something in the burning lead Humvee had caught his eye.  Several more rounds popped and clanged.  The flames rumbled.  The sky thumped with the approaching gunships. 

“C’mon, Marzan.  Let’s go!” Barked his partner.

But Jimmy had to take a closer look. 

“The gunships are coming!  Let’s go!”

Jimmy looked over the burning dead man riding shotgun.  He stepped close enough that he could feel the heat. 

A bullet zipped past. 

Marzan looked into the DSF soldier’s charcoal face that was splitting down the middle.  It looked as though something had grabbed hold of the scalp from behind and pulled it back so taught that it had ripped away the skull.  The eyes were soulless caverns.  The nose had burned off.  The mouth was stretched all the way open revealing a set of white horse teeth.

“C’mon, Jimmy!”

Several pings of exploding bullets rang.

Jimmy could feel the gunship’s rotors thumping in his chest.

The eyeless wraith stared into Jimmy Marzan.  Jimmy Marzan stood firm, staring right back at the devil.  He reached down and grabbed the spectre’s burning hand and yanked off the smoldering glove.  There, on the middle finger, Jimmy found the silver ring emblazoned with the eye of Osiris.

Will be out at 7Pm Mountain. I hope you like it.

Chapter 25 will be out this weekend.  Thank you all for reading and for all your encouragement.

Chapter 24

Vaughn and Jimmy left Garrity’s house and ran through the snow all the way back to the Vaughn’s pickup.  Neither spoke along the way as nothing needed to be said. 

Jimmy had to keep Vaughn under control as the drifts and ice were still quite treacherous.  It was an agonizingly slow drive out past Buffalo Creek towards Wellington Lake.  It took over an hour with nothing that could be done about quickening the pace.  Vaughn would call out intermittently and slam the heel of his hand down on his dashboard in raging, helpless protest against the slow road, the ice, and the distance which were all conspiring against his sanity and against Jessica’s life.  He muttered curses through his teeth as he drove.  His fingers squeezed and ratcheted away at the faithful Ford’s steering wheel. 

Marzan’s phone singled an incoming text message as they passed through the ghost town of Pine. 

“39189-105331”

The numbers were undoubtedly map coordinates.  It was a rendezvous and someone would be waiting for Marzan there.  Captain Rick, his leader, had found him.  He was gathering his flock as any good shepherd would.  They were soldiers and they had work to do.  Someone in Marzan’s unit had to have been told of Jimmy’s defection.  The resistance must have operatives inside the DSF, Jimmy thought, and they must also have known about his location as the rally point was reasonably close— less than ten miles.  One never knows where they plant those locator chips, anymore.

“It’s taking too god damn long”, Vaughn shouted as he slammed the dashboard again.

Jimmy calmed him down again by reminding him to breath— it was so unusually difficult to breathe for Vaughn.  They could not risk any more speed.  A wreck out here would be the end of all three of them.

They turned down an old Forest Service road that tracked back towards the Lake.  Vaughn knew exactly where the campsite was where Garrity said Jessica was kept.  Why didn’t he look there?  He wondered.  It seemed so onviojus.  But there was no way he could know.  There were hundreds of campsites in the general area.  She could have been anywhere or in none of them for all he knew before.   

They followed the road down into a gulch into deep snow.  Tire tracks were already laid there…probably by the truck Jimmy saw at the Mercantile building that one fateful night when he ran out of gas.  Vaughn stayed in the tracks the best he could.  The pressure and stress built inside and coursed and the blood throbbed in his veins.  His muscles tensed.  He pressed down on the accelerator and the tires spun pitching the back end of his truck out to the right, precariously close to the edge which dropped some twenty feet down into a frozen creek bed.  It might as well have been a thousand feet as they were now far away from where anyone would find them. 

If they wrecked they would have to walk out…if they could walk.  Marzan knew how to survive the cold but Vaughn and Jessica, if they were to find her alive, would probably freeze to death in the frigid January night.

“Easy there,” Jimmy remarked, putting his hand on Vaughn’s shoulder to steady him as the truck righted itself.

One more bend in the road and another drop, descending into the spruces, which like the shadier areas, down to the plane of the creek.  There it was dead ahead: the campsite, marked by Garrity’s tire tracks which turned off the road into it along the banks of the frozen creek.  The snow was at least a foot deep there.  Old footprints dotted a pathway leading to an outbuilding. 

Vaughn jumped out with Jimmy close behind.

“Jessica!  Jessica!”  Vaughn shouted. 

Nothing. 

He ran up to the door of the outbuilding.  It was padlocked. 

“Jessica!”

“Hang on!” Jimmy ordered.  He ran back to the truck and rummaged around in the back of the cab.

“Jessica!  Can you hear me?”  Vaughn shouted.  A dreadful notion of death poisoned his mind.  “Jessica!  It’s me!  Jessica!”

Jimmy returned with a tire iron and pried the latch loose with one jolt.  Vaughn threw open the door and stormed in.  It was empty inside.  Jessica wasn’t there.  Vaughn lunged towards the shithole and lifted the lid, looking down into it.  It was pitch black.  Jimmy ran back to the truck and grabbed Vaughn’s flashlight.  He returned and handed it to Vaughn.

“Jessica!  Are you down there?  Jessica!”  Vaughn shouted as he shined the light into the hole. 

Nothing. 

Jimmy yanked on the crate that formed a bench seat for the toilet and the entire box slid away from the wall.  Jimmy helped him push it out the door.  Vaughn shined the light down into the hole again. 

Nothing. 

The opening was well big enough for a man to climb down into. 

“One second!” Marzan ran back to the truck again and returned with a rope.  He dropped one end in the hole and tied the other around his waist.  “Go!” He shouted. 

Vaughn took hold and climbed down. 

“Jessica!”  He shouted as he descended. 

The cistern was dry and clean and warm.  Jimmy went down about ten feet before touching the floor.  He shined the light around.

Blankets!  A pile of blankets covered something in the corner.  He pawed through them, shouting out “Jess” as he flung them aside.  He found a hand!  It was cold. 

“No!  No!” 

He pawed the covers off and followed the hand to her cold arm up to her shoulder.  He shined the flashlight on her face.  It was her.  It was Jessica!  He had found her.  But she was pale.  He touched her neck and her cheek.  Cold.  She didn’t move. 

“No!  No!  Jessica!” 

He held her close to him in that dark, wretched place.  He rocked her back and forth.  Was he too late?  He listed to her chest but didn’t hear anything.  He shined the light in her face.

“Jessica…” 

He saw a faint mist of carbon dioxide in the light.  She was breathing.

“Jimmy, she’s alive,” Vaughn shouted triumphantly.

Jimmy Marzan couldn’t believe it, himself.  He thought she was gone for sure as soon as that bastard Garrity had given her up.  Perhaps Garrity had believed it was so.  Jimmy hoped the fucker had frozen to death. 

“Jess, can you hear me?”  Vaughn asked as he held the light in her face.

Her eyes rolled about under their eyelids.

“Jess!  It’s me.” 

She moaned but she didn’t have the strength to open her eyes or speak.

“Tie the rope around her…under her shoulders.  Then push her up to me,” Jimmy ordered.

Vaughn looped the rope around her and lifted her up towards the opening.  With Marzan pulling from the top they quickly got her out.  Marzan carried her to the truck and buckled her into the front seat.  He turned the truck’s heat on all the way up.  Then he ran back to pull Vaughn up.  Once out, Vaughn embraced him.  He was overcome and started to weep.

“You’ve got to get her to a hospital,” Jimmy explained.

Vaughn let go of his friend and wiped the tears out of his eyes with his sleeve.  He smiled uncomfortably and started back for the truck but he noticed that Jimmy wasn’t getting in but rather gathering up his things.

“We should get going,” Vaughn advised.

Jimmy Marzan just grinned. 

“I’m not going back with you, Vaughn.”

Vaughn instantly knew that his friend had gotten the signal he was waiting for. 

“What are you gonna do?  It’s freezing out here.”

“I’ll be all right.  My unit is close.  I can reach them by noon, tomorrow at the latest so long as I can stay under the canopy.” 

“Let me drive you to them,” Vaughn offered.

“You can’t get there that way.  It’s way off the roads.  You’ll just draw attention, anyway.  You’ve got to get her to a hospital or at least in front of a good fireplace.  She’s probably dehydrated.”   

“Thank you, Jimmy,” Vaughn offered as he wiped his running nose.  “Thank you for helping me.  I’ll never forget you.”

“Just get her to someplace warm.”

“I don’t know how I can ever repay you…”

“You already have, my friend.”

And with a slap of his hand on the fender of Vaughn’s faithful truck, Jimmy Marzan turned and melted into the woods.  Vaughn wiped the tears out of his eyes again, got into his truck and headed back towards Evergreen. 

#

 

Jessica started to come around as the heat of the truck warmed her back to life.  She was mumbling incoherently but Vaughn took that as a good sign.  He had to get her down the hill (as they say) to a hospital and that meant driving into the Denver, way after curfew. 

Once on highway 285, he pressed the accelerator, pushing his nerves to their limit on the winding, ice covered highway.  There were no other cars on the road, not even the government rigs with their sinister blue eagle trailers.  It was as if the road had been closed to everyone except him. 

“Jess, can you hear me?”

Jessica groaned again but she had yet to open her eyes.  Perhaps it was a delirium of some sort, Vaughn thought. 

The snow was falling and Vaughn clicked on his wipers to sweep the flakes away.  The road was alighted by an occasional highway streetlamp but three out of four were either turned off or burned out.  Thirty miles per hour was about the limit that the dark, icy conditions would allow.  

Vaughn checked the rearview mirror.  There were headlamps following him.  They were way back.  He checked again a few seconds later and confirmed they were gaining on him.  He scanned up the road to the arc of the next street lamp which was about a quarter mile ahead.  The snow danced about in his headlamps.  He checked the mirror again.  The lights were definitely closing in on him, closing rapidly.  Whatever it was it was doing about sixty miles per hour which was insanity for the conditions. 

It wasn’t a semi.  It was too small and the lights were too low.  A small truck, perhaps?  Vaughn looked ahead to the next streetlamp.  Boxy shapes appeared in the middle of the road, blocking the highway off.  Vaughn slowed and came to a stop in the middle of the highway.  Four military vehicles blocked the road some two hundred yards ahead.

What should I do? He thought as his truck idled.  The snow fell.  The nearest streetlamp flickered.

Behind him a few hundred yards the truck that was following him had pulled off the highway onto the shoulder.  Ahead of him, blackened silhouettes of the military vehicles barred the way. 

Jessica mumbled at his side.

The snowflakes flickered in his high beams.

Vaughn could make out the vehicles ahead.  They were MRAPS, boxy like Humvees but taller.  They were painted black.  Vaughn had never seen military vehicles painted black before.

The truck that had followed him pulled back out onto the road and Vaughn saw that it was a Sheriff’s vehicle as its broad side appeared for an instant before completing a u-turn and going back down the highway the other direction.

The MRAPs ahead stood silent.

Vaughn’s heart began to pound.

Jessica mumbled again and raised her arm to her forehead.

The Sheriff’s truck disappeared completely from view.

Vaughn couldn’t understand why no soldiers from the MRAPs were hailing him of approaching.  Something wasn’t right.

What do I do?  He thought. 

“Vaughn…” 

Jessica was coming too.  He saw that her eyes were opening.  He placed his hand behind her neck and leaned in towards her to whisper into her ear….

…But a flicker of light flashed in his peripheral vision and not a fraction of a second later he heard a half dozen zips of bullets slicing the air immediately outside the truck.  For a brief moment Vaughn felt inclined to get out and throw his hands up in the air but his instincts took over.  He slammed the transmission into reverse and stomped his foot down on the gas.  His truck roared to life, wheels spinning as it barreled backwards down the highway.  He pushed Jessica’s face down onto the console and looked back over his shoulder to drive.  Several thuds punctuated the cab and the radio lit up and buzzed at full volume.  The windshield fractured and shards of plastic shrapnel exploded everywhere.  One of the headlights was shot out.  Antifreeze splashed him in the face and the sweet vomit smell of it filled the cab. 

He backed the truck at a whining full speed for about a quarter mile before executing a backing spin-out that would have rolled the truck eleven out of ten tries in any other circumstance but his faithful rig executed the maneuver perfectly.  He stomped on the gas again and barreled back down the highway. 

Vaughn glanced in his rearview mirror but the mirror was gone.  The side mirrors were shattered as well.  He didn’t want to look back, anyway.  Sometimes you don’t want to know what’s gaining on you.  Jessica was groaning.  He felt he neck.  It was warm and wet.  He jerked his hand up to his tongue and tasted it.  Thankfully it was just antifreeze. 

The Ford was badly wounded but she stammered pinged and rattled on for about three miles before finally decelerating and dying on the side of the road. 

Vaughn turned on the interior light.  Jessica wasn’t bleeding.  Her eyes were open, now.  The radio buzzed at full volume.  Vaughn fiddled with the knobs to no avail.  He turned the key back and the ear piercing wail finally ceased.  He took a moment to catch his breath.  It was so hard to breathe. 

“Are you hurt?”  Vaughn asked her.

“No.  Are you?”

He was. 

It was as if someone had swung and hit him with a heavy metal pipe just below the ribs.  He knew it the instant it happened because he saw a flash in the inside of his eyes.  It was like seeing stars after getting hit in the head with a vicious haymaker.  With the adrenaline wearing off, a terrible pain worked its way down his left arm so that he could no longer move it.  It was ever more difficult to catch his breath.  He reached into his coat with his right hand and felt for the wound in his gut.  He found a small tear in the flesh.  Warm fluid was cascading out of it.  He didn’t dare remove his hand because he didn’t want Jess to see all that blood.  She wasn’t any good with blood.

“Vaughn…”  She asked, sensing something.

“I’m okay.”

“Vaughn, are you hurt?”

“I’m…” it was remarkably difficult to speak.  He tried to catch his breath again.

Jessica reached her hand into Vaughn’s coat and she felt the warm, damp wound.  She kept her hand on his but the more pressure the put on the tiny wound, the more the blood seemed to leak out between their fingers. 

Jessica’s eyes filled up.

“What do I do, Vaughn?”

“You go to mom’s…” He trailed off.  He couldn’t get enough air in to speak anymore.

Jessica pulled herself close to him.  Her soft, golden hair, dimly lit by the golden glow of the streetlamp, fell down and caressed his neck.  She held him, pouring all of her love into his broken body.

That sat there in silence for some time.

Vaughn breathed in erratic bursts, his left arm was paralyzed.  But a presence began flowing into him through Jessica’s embrace and it took away his pain. 

Jessica sensed his transcendence.  She pulled herself up and looked into his eyes.  A bright white light filled the sky from the east.  It was a glow that illuminated all of the heavens as well as Jessica’s face for a few seconds that amounted to an eternity of time in Vaughn’s fleeting moments of life.  In that instant he knew that everything would be all right.  Jessica would live.  She would be a mother again.  He felt his love for her completely, like an impenetrable cosmic force.  He felt terrible regret in that instant, too.  He regretted he would not be able to see his young daughter again.  He thought of little Brooke and how much he just wanted to be able to be sipping imaginary tea and eating invisible crumpets with her…whatever the hell crumpets were.  One last tea party would be a fine last wish and he wished it, so.  He envisioned Brooke as a grown woman, strong and beautiful and proud and with a child of her own.  He could see all of time, now.  He knew it would be so.  And finally, he accepted that it was okay to die this way.  Everyone has to die.  But not everyone goes out of life wrapped in the embrace of one’s love.  It was going to be all right.

The white glow of plasma faded and all the street lights and the one remaining headlamp and the dashboard lights of the faithful Ford went black. 

Jessica held Vaughn there in the total darkness.  She held him until the warmth began to leave his body.

#

 

A truck finally pulled up behind them.  It was a Sheriff’s Deputy— the same one that had given Vaughn the gas that one frozen evening at the Mercantile building, the same one that had tried so desperately to catch Vaughn’s truck has he hurtled towards oblivion at the MRAP checkpoint.  But he could not reach Vaughn in time and he had to turn back and shut down somewhere safe lest the radio-flash from the EMP have destroyed his vehicle. 

The Deputy and Jessica carried Vaughn’s body out and loaded it into the back of the Deputies’ truck.  He then drove them down the hill to Denver by the back roads…all the way to Vaughn’s mother’s house where Jessica was reunited with her daughter. 

Chapter 23

Mae made herself as small and quiet as she could in the back corner of a closet using the hanging clothes as extra cover.  The dogs were still barking outside.  She couldn’t understand why they weren’t charging back into the house.  She wanted to silently rip her hair out because of it.  Why weren’t Daisy and Stossy tearing apart the intruder that had taken Bob down into the basement at gun point? 

Bob had left his revolver in his nightstand but Mae had no idea how to use it.  She had never fired a gun before.  There were hammers and safeties and totally unfamiliar, potentially dangerous processes to worry about.  Even if she did know how to wield it, she lacked the requisite fortitude act decisively on the stealthy intruder who might see her first and blow her away before she could overcome her hesitancy.  She was already unnerved by him who moved about the house like a vaporous specter in the darkness.  He was undoubtedly expertly proficient in that he had so quickly and silently and effortlessly subdued Bob who was a professional law enforcer.  She remained hunkered in the closet trying not to breathe too loud, screaming silent, twisted screams of mortal terror.

Footsteps!  Just down the hall…

Oh Jesus.  Please don’t come in here, she silently prayed.

The soft steps stopped at the bedroom door.

Oh God.  Please don’t come in here…

The door handle turned.  The door swept open across the carpet into the dark bedroom.  She heard Bob’s screams seemingly far away, deep in the basement. 

Click.

A sliver of light appeared under the closet door where Mae was hiding.  She noticed the calf of her naked leg was exposed, sticking out from behind the hanging clothes.  She drew it back into her body slowly…back into her shadowy corner of the closet. 

Please don’t…please don’t look in here.  Oh god, she pleaded silently.   

Click.

The sliver of light vanished.  The footsteps made their way back down the hall and into the bathroom where Mae heard the tub faucet turned on. 

She sighed.

There must have been at least two intruders as she could hear Bob’s screams and pleas directed at one whilst another worked the nearby tub.  The knobs squeaked again and the water stopped flowing.  The footsteps left the bathroom and made their way back down to the basement.

She waited quietly in the darkness, petrified that there might be a third intruder waiting silently in the room, waiting patiently for her to peek her timid face out of the closet and then snatch her by the hair and drag her into the dungeon where some unknown fate awaited.  She waited in the dark silence. 

She heard Bob’s coughing and the muffled voices of the invaders.  Who were they?  Bandits?  Gangbangers?  Kidnappings were chronic and common in these difficult times.  Maybe they were parolees using the general anarchy as cover for taking revenge on a Sheriff who might have put them away at some point. 

For some reason it finally seemed safe to Mae for her to come out.  She slowly, quietly opened the closet door and peeked into the pitch black room.  She opened the door further, carefully, just wide enough to crawl out.  To her relief, no invader was there waiting to grab her by the scalp but her heart was racing nonetheless.  She crawled over to the nightstand and got Bob’s revolver.  The weight and unwieldiness of it surprised her.  She had never even handled a gun before.  She sat Indian style on the floor next to the nightstand holding the gun, back against the bed, clad in nothing but a t-shirt and panties. 

She tried to muster her courage.  If she dialed the cops it would take them at least twenty minutes to get to Bob’s secluded house.  And that’s if they answered, at all.  9-1-1 was only sporadically available, anymore.  And if she called the intruders might hear her, too.   She couldn’t find the phone in the darkness anyway and dared not turn on the light so she took a long deep breath and pulled herself up onto her bare feet. 

She clasped the revolver with both hands as she quietly emerged from the bedroom and proceeded down the stairs, down into the basement, then around a corner to the door leading into the garage.  She could hear the intruder’s voices clearly, now.  She heard water and coughing.  It was Bob’s coughing. 

What are they doing to him?  She asked herself. 

They were just behind the door, just a few feet away.  Splashing.  Coughing.  Threatening commands.  If she could just open the door and point the gun at them then Bob would know what to do from there.  But they have guns, too.  She reconsidered.  They’ll shoot me dead.  No, I can’t do it.  I can’t. 

The terror coursed through her arteries, freezing her in fear with both hands clumsily clutching the gun with its heavy barrel hanging droopily towards the door leading to the garage.  She thought for a second about just pulling the trigger and hoping the explosion might be enough to scare them off.  No, that was too risky.  She didn’t even have the nerve to put her fingers on the trigger.  She remained frozen in terror.  

One of the invaders spoke, “Bob, this is your last chance…I’m sure my friend here can’t wait to turn that hammer loose…”

“She’s…” Garrity stuttered, “she’s at a campground.  She’s at a campground.”

Mae could not understand.  What did that mean?  She could hardly believe her ears when she heard the rest of the interrogation.  She wanted to throw the gun down and run out into the snow and wail.  Then she tried to rationalize it.  There was no way that Bob could do such a thing, she assured herself.  But she quickly overcame this.  She knew it was true.  She knew Bob’s truth when he told it.  Her terror morphed into confusion. 

Who is this Jessica Clayton woman?  She asked herself.  What did Bob do to her?  Why did he do this?  Why?  The money— traveling money to get them to Costa Rica.  Bingo.  That son of a bitch, she muttered. 

Suddenly, her instinct for self-preservation re-manifested itself.  She knew that she would most certainly be implicated in Bob’s scheme and, in the least, her career would be totally ruined by the scandal.  She could not allow that to happen!  She was protected in the government with a lucrative career as an un-terminable tax-feeder.  She hobnobbed with the Treasury Secretary’s family and the President’s cabinet and all those billionaire bankers and their botoxed, Long Island wives and their cocktail parties where the bourgeois New Yorkers bitched about their detached, sadistic kids.  She couldn’t just surrender a life of privilege!  She would be destroyed by this scandal, at best relegated to some mahogany corporate hall, wasting her days and remaining sensuality cooking up financial lies and P&L propaganda for some Eu Claire cheddar cheese conglomerate.  She’d almost rather blow her fucking brains out right then and there.

Stop thinking like a loser, she cajoled herself.  You cannot accept this failure.  You cannot allow yourself to be tied to this scandal.  This is Bob’s mess.  Let him deal with it.  You have to go!  Go now!  Run!  Run! 

She couldn’t.  She heard the invaders footsteps.   She held the gun with two manicured index fingers on the trigger.  Now she was ready to shoot.  She would shoot them and make Bob clean it all up and then she would leave him for good this time.  She never should have come back, anyway.  He’s a loser, she thought, a hick loser in a hick county in a fly-over state.  A set of footsteps went the other way and out the side door. 

But then the garage door opened and a figure appeared before her.  It wasn’t Bob.  It was an intruder.  He stood in the frame of the door, backlit by the hanging garage light behind him.  The spectre raised his 9mm.  She drew bob’s revolver up.  Their eyes met.  But Mae could not squeeze.  She lowered the pistol back down and shook her head.  Jimmy Marzan left her there and slipped into the backyard.        

She waited for a moment, listening to Bob sobbing in the garage.  She stepped through the door.  Bob was there, tied up, covered with coats, blindfolded and gagged and soaking wet and shivering.  She approached him, gun in hand.  He didn’t hear her.  He was just trying to breathe through the gag and stave off succumbing to hypothermia.

“How could you do this?” she yelled at him. 

Bob mumbled through the tennis ball.  Instinctively she pulled the hammer back on the pistol.

“How could you do this to me!” she screamed.

Bob mumbled and strained under his gag and twine restraints.  His coats fell off.  He gripped the mallet tight in his numbing hand.  Mae ripped his blindfold off.   Bob screamed muffled screams trying to get Mae to remove the gag but she just stood there with the gun hanging, hammer cocked, directly between Bob’s knotted body and the shotgun affixed to the vice that was aimed at his chest.  The dogs barked viciously outside.  Bob shook his head vehemently from side to side.

“No! No! Careful.  Don’t touch that string!  Please take this gag off.  Look!  Look behind you!”  But his muffled pleas were unintelligible through the gag. 

“You son of a bitch!”  She exclaimed, raising the drooping barrel to his face.

“No!  Mae!  No!  I did it for us!  I did it for you!  I love you!” 

But she understood none of it as her shoulder pressed on the string.  Bob tried to raise the mallet in his hand to put more slack in the line but his wrist knots had no give in them.  He held his breath.  The dogs snarled and growled in the yard. He looked into her eyes.  He saw only an icy stare. 

He prayed.  He prayed that the all-consuming obsession he had for Maiden Lane, far more for her than for any other woman or girl in his life, would mean something, now.  That this angelic, powerful woman, this woman of crystalline intellect and shrewdness and class, this woman with sharpened edges and metallic armor yet this woman so desirable, so perfectly feminine and tauntingly, purely beautiful…that she must indeed finally know him, now!  She must by now fully understand him.  She must now finally comprehend his ruthless nature.  She must finally now know that he was just like her, that they were the same, that they were made for each other!  She had to know this, now.  She had to love him, now.  They were of one mind and one spirit.  He had now proved his worthiness to her.  He had finally proved his love and devotion by the lengths he was willing to go for her. 

He looked into her eyes.  They must soften at any instant, now.  She would throw down the gun and embrace him and press her breast against his and become one with him.  He had finally succeeded in winning Maiden Lane.  He had finally made her love him. 

But no.  No.  No.  No.  She did not love him.  Her cold, cat’s eye stare proved it.  He could see nothing in her glassy eyes but contempt.  No.  No.  No!  He cried, inside.  He had failed.

He was going to drop the mallet, drop the mallet and kill her with a shotgun blast that would rip through her heart and she would drop into his arms and he would be, if not immersed in  an embrace of her love, at least awash in her blood.  No, there was indeed no love in her eyes for him and it was finally, after so many years of chasing her and trying to prove it to her and to win her and to win her back…it was finally time to drop the mallet.

Drop it!

But he couldn’t do it.  He held on.  He was pathetic.

Bob heard two silencer bursts and his beloved dogs stopped barking.  He loved those dogs and now they were gone.  Soon Mae would be gone, too.  He would be alone, again.  And if he survived the cold he would be arrested or perhaps worse. 

Mae stepped back and the slack in the in the string returned. 

“Don’t go!”  He mumbled through the gag. 

But Mae backed away from him, leaving him knotted up in the frozen garage. 

“No!  Don’t go.  Mae!  Mae! I love you!”

But Mae left.  She turned on the lights in the house and got herself dressed.  She scoured the place for all of her belongings— jewelry, gadgets, gloves, perfume, sunglasses, clothes…nothing could be left behind.  She stuffed her things into a trash bag, carried them downstairs and threw them into Bob’s truck.  She checked the house once more, praying that she had gotten everything.  She could not risk being tied to him.  Not in any way. 

Should she kill him, too?  She asked herself. 

Garrity heard Mae going through the house.  He held out hope that she would come to her senses and at least untie him.  He begged to just be near her one last time but he knew deep down that she would not be coming back.  And she didn’t come back for him, anyway.  She never changed her mind.  She was just using him.  He heard her pass behind him and start his truck up and idle for a few moments.  The garage door opened and she drove off into the cold night.  She definitely would not be coming back. 

An hour and a half later she passed into the federal complex at DIA.  They took Bob’s truck away and had it destroyed.  They walked her down into the catacombs.  The red door appeared.  She turned the handle and went in. 

Bob surmised he would eventually be discovered frozen to death.  Everything was lost for him.  Even if his brotherhood covered for him, which they probably wouldn’t in such an extreme case, they would not be able to restore his life from the ruined state it was in.  Mae was gone, never to return.  He knew it.  He knew he would never love again.  He couldn’t breathe.  It was as if one of the intruders had taken the mallet and hammered him in the diaphragm with it.  He struggled against the knots but it was hopeless. 

His dogs…his beloved dogs— poor Daisy and Stossy.  They had come to him like angels, holding him together when Mae left the first time.  His glorious companions…his loyal shepherds were dead now, lying on their sides in the snow, tongues hanging out, black, sticky eyes stuck wide open. 

What was his life worth, anymore?  What was he worth as a man?  He could not even flee.  He was penniless.  He was trapped.  He was alone.  He was a failure.  He was naked, tied to a chair with a shotgun pointed at his heart and a trigger tied to a hammer held in his numbing hand.  How would he be found?  If he was, what would he say?  The intruders had filmed his confession.  It was all pointless.  He was finished any way he looked at it. 

He was now shivering uncontrollably.  Soon the hypothermia would put him to sleep.  His numb hand would relax.  The hammer would fall.  The shotgun would fire.  He would be dead.  

Bob Garrity looked into the barrel of the shotgun.  He gazed down at the hammer in his hand.  He prayed it would be instantaneous.  The timer ran out and the garage light switched off.