Lehman added, “He’s taking whatever he wants. Food, new trucks, merchandise off show room floors. Hell, he even raided the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Took some of the most famous Western art, then he went through the Winchester museum and confiscated weapons. Not just the machine guns and combat stuff, but some of the really expensive guns for his personal collection. The guy’s a whole new Herman Goering.”
“And we think he’s taking women,” Lehman said distastefully. “Out-of-state girls if the stories are true. The piece of shit calls them his ‘livestock’ and is keeping them in that big horse barn back of the property.”
“If we just had proof of that, every man, woman, and child in Wyoming would rise up and cut his throat,” Old Bill growled.
Agar took this in, fingers tapping on the tabletop. “What are you planning to do about it?”
“Depends,” Bill said. “How much leeway do we have?”
“As far as I’m concerned, as much as you need. I want the guy gone, but I don’t want to start a small war. Where are the county sheriffs in this?”
“Big Horn and Washakie Counties are with us,” Lehman said. “Sheriff Madden from Park and Hank Kapital from Hot Springs have taken the fawning sycophant route. They back Edgewater.”
Agar looked back, making a tent of his fingers. “I’ll leave it to you people to clean up your own messes in the counties. As for any action you take, if you want official sanction, we can do it in one of two ways: The first is through the Highway Patrol. Sully Richardson can swear you in as special agents, or whatever. The other option is that we can do it through the militia. I’ll have my staff write you commissions. That way you report directly to me.”
Sam glanced at Court, awed by what he was hearing.
“So we have free rein in this?” Bill lifted a questioning brow.
Agar gave him a dead-blank stare. “Within reason, Bill. I want the guy taken out. I don’t care how you do it as long as we don’t end up with a home-grown Game of Thrones in the Basin.”
“What about Federal repercussions?” Tank asked. “The guy’s the designated state director for the Department of Homeland Security, for God’s sake.”
Agar chuckled dryly. “Tank, operate under the assumption that there is no DHS. We’ve heard nothing from back east. It’s as if Washington has ceased to exist. If some kind of ad hoc government shows up somewhere down the road, I want Wyoming to be in a strong enough position to brush them off.”
“So, we take him out,” Evan said. “What’s next?”
“I want the Basin operationally functional. Self-reliant, and part of Wyoming.”
“What else would it be?” Lehman asked.
“Part of Montana,” Evan answered thoughtfully. “Geographically, the Bighorn Basin is an extension of the Yellowstone Valley, and economically it has closer ties with Billings.”
“You had any feelers from either Billings or Helena?” Agar asked.
“Nothing we’re aware of.” Tank sounded slightly bewildered, as if this were all brand new.
“They’ve been too busy in Helena with their own problems and seizing the Bighorn Basin isn’t in their political paradigm,” Evan replied.
“Yet,” Agar told him. “They’ll get around to it.”
Old Bill, a subtle smile on his lips, said, “Odd you’d think of it, Pete. What’s brought this on?”
“Rawhide,” Agar answered.
“What’s Rawhide?” Frank asked.
“Rawhide Energy Station.” Agar pointed south. “Big coal-fired power plant about twenty miles south of the border in Colorado.”
“You’ve seized it?” Sally asked in her whiskey voice.
“Wyoming needed it. Most of Rawhide’s electricity went to the Greenies, but Cheyenne, Laramie, and most of all, F.E. Warren Air Base, are on their grid. That’s big enough that General Kyzer and I have guaranteed Rawhide’s managers that we’d keep them safe, keep them fed, and supplied with coal. And, by God, I will do it even if it means formally annexing that part of Colorado. Electricity is my first priority.”
“And you think you’ve got that covered?” old Bill asked.
“I can’t save the state without it. I’ve got Wyoming’s power-generating stations under Guard protection from Gillette, to Douglas, to Wheatland, south to Rawhide on the east, with Bridger and Flaming Gorge on the west. I have your hydro plants in the Basin, Alcova, Seminoe, and Pathfinder; that covers the rest of the state.”
“And after that?” Evan asked.
“Fuel. I’ve got three refineries: Casper, Cheyenne, and Sinclair. Your crude in the basin is going out to either Laurel or Billings. But with the mountains in the way, I don’t know how I can help that.”
“We do,” Evan told him. “We want to build our own refinery.”
Agar smiled warily. “I think I’m going to like you, Dr. Holly.”
“You’re going to like Court, here, even more. He’s got a head for logistics and problem solving.”
Court flushed red, staring self-consciously at his coffee cup.
Agar said curiously. “What have the two of you been working on?”
“Self-sufficiency for the Bighorn Basin.” Holly leaned back in his chair and smiled. “A two-year plan.”
Sam thought that Agar was almost vibrating with interest as he said, “What are you doing tonight after seven?”
Holly chuckled. “Well, we all had tickets to La Boheme at the Met, but somewhere along the line I heard the performance was cancelled.”
Agar laughed.
Sam glanced unsurely at Court, who shrugged and whispered, “What’s La Boam?”
“La Boheme,” Sam whispered back. “It’s an opera.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s a... Oh, never mind.”
“Getting back to the problem,” old Bill said. “None of this happens if we can’t take Director Dickhead out of the equation. So, just to be sure we’re all on the same wavelength, Governor, you don’t care how we do, as long as we do it neatly?”
Agar smiled. “I like that word. Neatly.”
“Do you want a trial?” Tank asked, knuckles thoughtfully against his lips.
“I’ll leave that to your discretion. Mostly I just want results. And the sooner, the better.”
Sam fought to keep from gaping like an idiot.
Atrocity
There is no moral ambiguity when it comes to survival. Human values disintegrate in the struggle to still be breathing at the end of each day. German and Russian soldiers learned this in the horrendous caldron of the Russian front during the Second World War.
I learned it on The Line. Did things that would have been incomprehensible—beyond even my blackest of fantasy before the collapse. We all did.
I think we all asked ourselves: Are we heroes standing between barbarian hordes and the last vestiges of civilization? Or are we monsters committing a modern version of the holocaust?
The closer I came to believing the latter, the crazier I got. See enough death. Deal enough death. Witness enough despair. And what’s left to live for?
— Excerpt from Breeze Tappan’s Journal.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Silverware clinked, conversation was desultory as Sam sat at a table in the rear of the Hilton Hotel’s restaurant in downtown Cheyenne. After everything he’d been through since the collapse, his current situation hit him as totally unbelievable. The whole world had been kicked upside down and was rocking like a capsized turtle whose clawing legs couldn’t find enough purchase to right itself. Yet here he sat, surrounded by normal-looking people who chatted, drank coffee, and ate sandwiches as a waitress bustled around them.
Frank had driven old Bill, Evan, and Court back to the Capitol for the seven o’clock meeting, which left Sam on his own for the evening. So here he sat, trying to make sense of the tumbling events in his life.
I just heard the governor of Wyoming order the murder of an appointed official of the United States government.
> The notion floored him as he stared into the foamy head atop his glass of stout.
Not that he had any love for dickhead Edgewater, his thugs, or his arrogant despotism. Like Stalin’s chief of secret police, Lavrentii Beria, or Hitler’s Reinhard Heydrich, Edgewater—a minor functionary—suddenly found himself unleashed to practice his most sordid fantasies without fear of reprisal.
Sam fingered his cheek where the deep bruise remained tender. No love lost there—let alone for the fact that Edgewater had been on the verge of abducting Shyla.
And I couldn’t do anything about it.
He’d been powerless, hit without warning, and worse, so scared he could hardly stand it. Which left a deep-seated sense of shame in his Latino-macho soul.
So, good riddance to Edgewater.
A part of him wanted to be there, to see the monster taken down. Another part understood that getting to the man would be dangerous. Edgewater’s armed goons—at least the ones Sam had stared eyeball-to-eyeball with—would shoot without hesitation at the first hint that their patron was threatened. Work was that before Edgewater’s retreat to the Bighorn Basin, he’d seized weapons from the Wyoming National Guard Armory in Guernsey. Any frontal move would be met with serious resistance.
“So, Bill, how are you and your merry band of conspirators going to take the bastard out?” he asked himself.
As he pondered various scenarios of ambushes and midnight raids, the young woman walked in. Maybe a couple of years younger than he, she immediately drew his eye.
Something in her walk reminded him of a soul-wounded warrior. Thick brunette hair hung down over her back in a ponytail. She wore a heavy yellow-and-tan motorcycle jacket, open to expose a light shirt tucked in at a thin waist. A belted pistol was on her hip, an ugly black rifle hung from one hand, and worn Levi’s conformed to slim legs.
The way she carried herself, Sam immediately placed her as a Wyoming woman, possessed of that same quality he saw in Pam. Mindful of her, in fact. While not movie-star beautiful, her looks and presence made her damned attractive.
A heavy canvas military bag hung over her shoulder.
Sam did a double take. Thought at first glance that he knew her. Then dismissed it. Something about the eyes, the planes of her perfectly proportioned face.
He gave her a smile when she glanced his way—and let it fade at the haunted look she gave him in return.
The young woman slung the heavy bag against the wall and propped the rifle beside it. Her coat rustled when she peeled it from her shoulders and draped it over the back of her chair. She seated herself in the corner booth, her back to the wall.
The waitress called, “The usual?”
“Yeah, Bess.” Something in her voice communicated a sense of futility.
From the corner of Sam’s eye, he watched her prop elbows on the table and drop her head into her hands. The slump of her shoulders hinted at exhaustion and defeat.
Sam pursed his lips and stared into his beer. Lot of that going around. Hell, how did anyone really see a glimmering for the future?
Well, except for me.
He had the woman of his dreams waiting for him back at the ranch. Idly he asked himself: If I had to make the choice between keeping the world as it was, saving Mother and Father, the whole economy, and all those people’s lives, or giving up a future with Shyla, what would I choose?
“Damn, Sam,” he whispered. And with a flutter in his gut, he answered, “I’d choose Shyla.”
Which made him decidedly uncomfortable.
Who the hell have I become?
As he mulled a way to bargain with the universe in an attempt to both save the world and keep Shyla, a soldier came striding in: fifties, silver hair, hard gray eyes, and hat tucked under his left arm. The man’s uniform had seen better days.
The soldier didn’t hesitate, but walked to the woman’s booth and seated himself across from her as he placed his hat on the corner of the table. “Saw your bike out front. I hoped you’d made it back.”
The young woman tilted her face up, leaving her chin supported on her palms. “Glad I could make someone’s day.”
“Got a call from the guys out at Able X-Ray. They were worried. Said you seemed really upset, on the verge of tears. Asked me to check and make sure you didn’t do something dumb like pile the bike into a bridge abutment on the way back.”
From the corner of his eye, Sam caught the woman’s grim smile, the hardening of her brown-and-hazel eyes. “Hey, Captain, if I’m going out, I’m not trashing the bike in the process. I love that beast too much to hurt it.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Heard that the guys over at Charley Echo had a tough day.”
“Somebody down south got the bright idea that if they welded plate to a dump truck, they could smash their way through the line. Figured the plate would stop 5.56 rounds, and the truck was heavy enough to bash the Humvees out of the road. I guess their intelligence was flawed.”
“Charlie Echo has Ma Deuce don’t they?”
“Good memory. That big fifty tore the dump truck into scrap. Turned into a merry little firefight for about an hour or so.”
“Any of our guys hurt?”
“Two. Nothing that stitches won’t take care of.”
Sam sat rapt, trying to picture what these people lived with every day. Charlie Echo? Had to be the code names for the line of defensive posts established along the Colorado line to keep refuges south of the border.
The brunette asked, “When are you going to let me back into Charlie sector?”
“What set you off today?”
“Who says I was ‘set off?’”
“The guys at Able X-Ray.” The Captain arched a knowing brow. “Come on, you know how the whole line feels about you. What happened out there today?”
Sam endured the long pause as the young woman and Captain engaged in a steely-eyed staring match.
Finally, the woman said, “A little girl, Cap. In a tent in a gully. Her family had somehow managed to get north of the line, found all the ranches burned. Ran out of water. She must have died first. Dad capped her big brother, then the mom, then did himself. And here’s this little girl. In the damn tent, propped up by her favorite toy. A filthy stuffed sheep if you can imagine.”
“You pass dead people on the side of the road all the time. What was different about these?”
“They had nothing.” She paused. “No food. Empty water bottles. Nothing in their pack.” She knotted a fist as she fought for control. “But they carried her stuffed sheep. And when she died, they left her, propped up with her beloved...”
The woman looked away, before adding, “Captain, how many of them have I just driven past? I mean, all it would have taken was a water bottle. Just a single...”
The silence stretched; Sam’s stomach gone hollow.
Finally, the captain said, “There’s no law that says you have to be a hero twenty-four seven. God, girl, take a break. Even my people on the line get a rotation. You’re out there every morning. Taking chances my people wouldn’t take on a dare.”
“I’m not doing anything the other girls aren’t. Lauren Davis, Audra Barkley, we’re all— ”
“Last time you came back with two bullet holes in your coat. Even you admitted that you just got lucky.”
The captain pointed a hard finger. “You and I both know that from here on out, it’s just going to get harder. Like that armored dump truck. It’s not families anymore. We’re looking at raiders. They’ve killed all the livestock, horses, and pets south of the line. Burned and looted everything lootable. These are desperate people willing to punch a hole in the line, hoping to hit outlying ranches and homes, load up what they can, and hightail it back south.”
“All the more reason you need us to keep the OPs stocked in ammo and food.”
“I’m calling it,” the captain told her. “You’ve got a choice: enlist in the Guard, or take a break, but your days of traipsing around the border on the bike are
over.”
“You can’t do that,” she said hoarsely.
“Bet me. You gonna enlist?”
“Not a chance. You’d order me into some office somewhere.”
“That’s the nice thing about being an officer.”
“Why are you doing this?” Her voice sounded empty.
“Because you’ve lit the slow-burning fuse, and it’s just a matter of time before you detonate. You’re dancing ever closer to disaster out there. Every man and woman in the Guard would die for you, but I’m not going to let you get yourself killed just because you don’t see any way out.”
She sat there, muscles tense, on the verge of shattering.
The captain pushed his chair back and stood. “I’ve got to go. Meeting. Something’s cooking up north. But I mean it. You’re relieved, and I’ve given orders at the quartermaster’s. You are officially ‘stood down’.”
Her voice might have been an overstretched wire. “Want me to beg?”
“Nope.” He paused. “But I’d ask you to do me a personal favor.”
“What?”
“Go home. Take a break. Give it a month or so. After that if you want, yeah, come on back.” He paused. “But not until then. You got me?”
“Yes, sir.” It was said in total defeat.
The captain turned and strode rapidly for the door.
The waitress placed a sizzling steak and potatoes in front of the woman, along with a glass of beer.
Sam lingered for maybe another half hour, nursing his stout, trying to cast surreptitious glances at her. In that entire time, the young brunette never so much as reached for her fork. While her food went stone cold, she just sat there, as if paralyzed, and stared. Without expression. At nothing.
The Balancing Act
As far as havens go, Cheyenne wasn’t much in those days. But the lights were on, the water worked, there was food and places to shelter from the rain and sun. For most people, it might not have been high living, but compared to the palls of smoke rising over the Front Range cities down in Colorado, it beat the hell out of alternatives.
Dissolution: The Wyoming Chronicles: Book One Page 23