A Thousand Years of Darkness: a Thriller

by Charles W. Sasser

  “How am I going to drink with my hands tied?”

  “Sorry. You’ll have to do the best you can. I’ll be back for the cup in a minute. Don’t let on to the others that I brought it.”

  He walked away. Since his hands were tied behind his back, Nail lay belly down on the floor and used his chin and lips to tip the water into his mouth. He was thirsty. The sharp edge of the thin-rimmed cup nicked his lip. Quickly, he poured what was left of the water on the floor and turned around to pick up the cup with his hands.

  Scrambling to his feet, he fumbled the cup and dropped it. It clanged on the cement floor. Nail froze, fearing he may have alerted his guards. His young benefactor had obviously gone against the others in bringing him water. He needed the kid to return for the cup rather than the others.

  Loud laughter came from up front. The guards sounded too immersed in smoking and joking to pay much attention to a prisoner who, after all, was trussed up and safely locked in his cell.

  Retrieving the cup, he backed up to a loose nail in the wall he had noticed earlier. The head of the nail barely protruded. It took him only a few minutes of feeling with his hands to insert the thin lip of the cup behind the nail head and pry it from the wall to a length of about an inch. Another few minutes of sawing the plastic tie-strip across the nail head and his hands broke free. Thank God for plastics.

  He was unlikely to get another chance—if merely freeing his hands in a jail cell could be considered a chance—so he had better make this one good.

  He placed the cup on the floor two paces inside where it could be seen by anyone looking through the door window. Then, pretending he was still bound, he sprawled with his back against the wall, closed his eyes, and feigned sleeping. Hey, it always worked for Humphrey Bogart and Clint Eastwood. He hoped Sharon had at least one more wish from the falling star in her bag.

  “Psst! Hey! Wake up in there. I need the cup back.”

  Nail snored deeply.

  “Mister? Wake up.”

  Nail snored. He heard the boy turn and walk away.

  It hadn’t worked.

  He was about to give up when he heard the rattle of a key in the door. The boy must have gone to retrieve it. The door opened. Through slitted eyelids, Nail watched the kid hesitate in the doorway as he glanced back toward the guardroom, then back at the tin cup only two steps away.

  Damn! The kid appeared unarmed. Nail needed a gun, but he had to play out the hand dealt him.

  Come on in, said the spider to the fly.

  The boy did. He bent over to pick up the cup. In that instant, while his attention was diverted, Nail sprang to his feet like a cat. The old bullet wound had never handicapped him. In a single bound he was on the Green Shirt, one hand muffling his mouth, the other arm around his neck to choke off his breathing. He shoved the door closed with his foot and frog-marched the kid to the far corner of the room to establish ground rules. Too bad there wasn’t a fence post available.

  The Green Shirt was so damned skinny that Nail almost felt sorry for him as he applied pressure with his neck hold to stop the kid from fighting back. Lucky the kid wasn’t the size of Man Mountain Dean or that murdering piece of shit Forbis.

  “I don’t want to kill you,” Nail said. “You might live if you do what I say.”

  The boy relaxed, accepting the terms.

  “How many guards up front? Use your fingers.”

  The kid held up five fingers. Nail cut off his wind. “How many?”

  Two fingers.

  “That’s better. They armed? One finger for yes, two for no.”

  One finger.

  “How come you’re not packing? Never mind.”

  Nail swept his captive’s feet out from underneath him and dropped him to a sitting position. The Green Shirt’s eyes wallowed about in terror. He seemed to understand that this hard, Indian-looking man would snap his neck like a twig if he had to.

  With one hand, the other keeping his prisoner muzzled, Nail ripped off the boy’s AmeriCorps T-shirt and tore it into thick strips, using his knee and free hand. Soon, the boy was gagged and tied hand and foot with strips of his own T-shirt and his boot laces and belt.

  The key was still in the door. Nail bent over the kid. “I expect you to wait here for me,” he quipped.

  He locked the cell door behind him, pocketed the key, and slipped down the hallway toward the other door, a plan already formed in his mind. He listened with his ear close to the door. He heard the voices of two men.

  The old trick of faking sleep had worked once. Why wouldn’t another old trick work just as well?

  He flattened himself against the wall so that when the door opened inwardly he would be behind it. Turning his head away to project his voice down the hallway, he let out a low moan. Everything went quiet in the guardroom.

  “Smitty?”

  Nail waited a couple of heartbeats and groaned again.

  “Stop fucking around, Smitty!”

  A chair scraped across the floor. Footsteps approached. The door opened. A Green Shirt stepped tentatively into the hallway. Bigger and stronger-looking than Smitty, with his head shaved. He wore a Glock in a holster. Maybe Smitty was unarmed because they didn’t trust him to carry.

  “What the fuck you doing, Smitty?”

  He started down the hallway. Nail hesitated a moment to make sure the second guard wasn’t following. He pushed the door closed with his knee and pounced. The Green Shirt yelped in surprise. Nail threw him to the floor and ripped the pistol from its holster.

  A chair in the other room crashed to the floor. Nail tapped his victim on the head with the butt of the gun. Well, maybe a bit more than a tap. Blood sprayed.

  Nail snapped upright and pivoted toward the door, his thumb instinctively switching the Glock to safety Off. The door banged open. The other Green Shirt filled the doorway. Seeing Nail, his hand snaked toward the gun at his belt.

  The sound of gunplay would bring others running. It had to be avoided. Nail greeted the Green Shirt with a cold grin, his gun leveled, steady and pointed at mid-mass.

  “One of us is going to die,” he promised in a low growl.

  Hand still on the butt of his gun, the Green Shirt’s gaze reflexively shifted toward his bleeding buddy on the floor. This guy was holding his head with both hands, blood spurting between his fingers while he tried to push himself into the wall to escape from the mad Indian standing above him.

  “The surest way to get your heads blown off is to have them up your asses,” Nail warned.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Ozark Mountains

  Green Shirt training seemed to have been suspended as the heat index pegged around one-ten, all activity moving indoors out of the sun. Nail was armed and dangerous with the pair of Glock 19s he relieved from the two guards, who, along with the kid Smitty, were now tied hand and foot in his former cell with plastic tie-strip handcuffs he located in a closet in the guard room. The only sounds they made were muffled complaints through their gags.

  The shaved-head guy was still bleeding pretty good from where Nail tapped him on the head, but he wasn’t seriously injured. Nail had stripped the other of his black jeans, bill cap, green T-shirt and holster and donned them himself. His new apparel fit a bit snug, but it would have to do. The shaved-head man was more Nail’s size, but he had blood all over his uniform.

  Disguised in the AmeriCorps outfit, Nail hoped to locate and reach Sharon before he was discovered. He would deal with Forbis and Henshaw later—pass jail, skip trial and go directly to the morgue. But Sharon came first.

  The groomed parade field that lay between the stockade and the long green barracks was about one football field across. The only way to reach the CQ where Sharon was apparently being held was to cross it in the open.

  Nail jerked the bill of his purloined uniform cap lower over his eyes to hide his features. He was about to turn from the office windows to head for the door when he spotted two Green Shirts exiting the green barracks. The larger of
the two resembled Forbis until he removed his cap to swipe sweat from his brow, revealing a full thatch of short black hair.

  They headed toward the stockade. At this rate, Nail was going to have his old cell filled with Green Shirts. Somebody was bound to get suspicious. Nail had learned in the army that the best battle plan rarely survived first contact with the enemy.

  The kid Smitty gave him an idea. He hurried to the locked cell, untied the kid’s feet and escorted him to the guard room. The two Green Shirts were halfway across the parade field and still coming.

  “Do exactly what I say and you and those two assholes coming out here will live,” Nail informed him. “I’ll strangle you if you make an attempt to warn them.”

  The cop untied his hands and removed his gag.

  “Sit at the desk,” he instructed. “Don’t get up for any reason. Get rid of those guys if they come in here. If anything goes wrong—”

  Nail let him take a long believer’s look down the barrel of his Glock.

  “P-Please. I’m supposed to get married next month—”

  “Congratulations. We don’t want to make her a widow before she’s a bride. Act natural. I’ll be in the hall behind the door watching every move you make.”

  “Y-Y-yessir,” Smitty stammered.

  Nail placed both hands on Smitty’s shoulders and leaned over face to face with him.

  “Calm down. Your life depends on it.”

  He was taking a big chance on the kid, but it seemed his best option. He limped to the hallway door and closed it behind him, leaving the door cracked enough that he could see most of the room. Smitty flinched but remained seated when the two Green Shirts sauntered in. Neither was armed. Nail figured they had been sent over from CQ to check on the guards.

  “Damn, Smitty, you’re sweating like a hog,” the black-haired one observed. The other was a redhead. “Turn up the air.”

  “It’s set on eighty,” Smitty managed with some degree of normality. “That’s regulation.”

  “Dude, you look like shit,” the redhead noted.

  “Uh...”

  “What’s the matter with you, man?” the dark one demanded.

  “I’m...uh...not feeling well. I’ve been vomiting all day.”

  “Why don’t you rack out? We don’t need three guards to watch one asshole. Speaking of assholes, how’s he doing?”

  “He’s in his cell.”

  “CQ says make sure not to open his door for nothing. He’s a cop and they say he’s a mean son of a bitch. Where’s Crabb and Pee Wee?”

  “They, uh, went to the mess hall to get some iced tea,” Smitty lied with growing confidence. “They’ll be right back.”

  “There’ll be a fecal storm if the Commander finds out they left their post without reporting in.”

  “You won’t tell?” Smitty whined. “They’ll be back real quick.”

  The Green Shirt visitors laughed. “Dude, you are such a pussy.”

  “I’m not a pussy.”

  “Then you’re the next thing to it.”

  “H-How long we gonna be on watch?”

  The dark-haired Green Shirt shrugged. “I guess until they tell us. We’re outa here, pussy. Tell Crabb and Pee Wee they’re pushing it, taking off like they did.”

  They laughed and shut the door behind them as they left. Smitty slumped at the desk, looking spent. Nail came out and checked on the departing Green Shirts through one of the windows. They were going back the same way they came. The somnolent hum of a hot summer’s day remained otherwise undisturbed.

  “I-I did what you said,” Smitty hazarded.

  “You did good, kid.”

  “W-What are you going to do with me?”

  “That depends. Which one of those buildings is the CQ?”

  “It’s the lower white one behind the green barracks.”

  Nail thought about it. Somebody was bound to notice one man out in the heat and question his purpose. He wondered if he could hole up until evening when activity started to pick up again. He sank onto the spare chair at the desk where he could watch Smitty and at the same time keep his eyes peeled out the window. Smitty shifted nervously.

  “Is it true you was a police officer?” he asked to break the stale air. He sounded calmer.

  “What else have you heard?”

  “They said you was with the terrorists who hung the federal worker in the cemetery.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I—” Smitty hung his head.

  “How did you get involved with this bunch? You don’t seem the type.”

  “They’re like my family—”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  Smitty looked up inquiringly, as though to gauge the cop’s interest. Nail encouraged him with a flick of his hand.

  “I guess it was Michael Moore,” he said hesitatingly. “You know, the fat guy who makes movies? I seen him, like, on Oprah or something. He was saying like how young people have to face the truth. We ain’t never going to be rich. The system is rigged in favor of the few fat cats and we aren’t one of them. Not now. Not never. I couldn’t find a job, so when I heard about AmeriCorps, I went and signed up.”

  He suffered himself a tremulous half-grin, as in apology.

  “Were you at the old schoolhouse last night with the others?” Nail asked.

  Smitty actually blushed. He was probably no older than eighteen or nineteen, one of the little hill boys like Nail had been growing up. Sharon said kids like him were being indoctrinated in “social justice” and “liberation theology” through the public education system.

  “There used to be shows on TV like Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, and Leave It To Beaver in which fathers were strong role models,” Sharon had pointed out during their stay at the Safe House. “Today, father figures on the boob tube are a bunch of dolts and fools. It’s part of the Progressive culture to break down the family. Families fall apart, kids leave home, creating a vacuum for government to fill. If I had children of my own, they’d never step one foot into a public school.”

  She was opening Nail’s eyes bit by bit.

  Movement outside caught his attention. He stood to get a better look through the window as a party of four Green Shirts appeared from around one end of the Green Barracks and headed west toward the rise of forested hills nearby. Sharon’s red T-shirt stood out in the field of green.

  Smitty’s face bleached to corpse pale. “Mr. Nail,” he said in a choked voice, “they’ll be coming for you next.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Ozark Mountains

  Smitty acknowledged what he said nearly everyone in camp already knew—that Sharon and Nail were going to be made disappeared in order to avert any kind of controversy over their deaths. The tattoo on Forbis’ arm was visible even from a distance.

  “I don’t want nothing to do with this,” Smitty said.

  “Prove it.”

  Changing plans, Nail hurriedly stripped off the guard’s uniform he had just put on and returned to his jeans, T-shirt and ball cap. He gave the guard’s holster and one of the Glocks, unloaded, to Smitty. The other pistol, loaded, he stuck in his belt underneath his T-shirt in the small of his back where it would be easy to reach with his hands loosely tie-stripped behind to give the appearance that he was cuffed.

  “If anybody stops us,” he told Smitty, “you’re escorting me to the woods.”

  A back door down the hallway led out onto the parade ground. In Nail’s former cell, the shaved-headed man, Crabb, was still issuing complaints through his bloody gag. Pee Wee huddled in a corner with his legs pulled up to his chin.

  Nail exited and walked at a fast pace along the edge of a single line of widely-spaced cedars, Smitty a step behind in his role as appointed guard. Sharon and her escort were ahead of them by a considerable lead and were approaching a wooded hill.

  The sun bore down. Nail’s shirt soaked up perspiration from heat and anxiety. Sharon and the Green Shirts with her entered the trees out
of sight. Nail increased his stride without breaking into a jog that might arouse the suspicion of observers. His limp was nothing more than an inconvenience.

  Smitty glanced back and uttered a warning. “Oh, God! They’ve found Crabb and Pee Wee tied up. They’re heading this way.”

  Nail looked and saw five or six Green Shirts racing after them. It wouldn’t take them long to catch up. Nail thought he recognized the figure leading the pack. Henshaw, the other gunman from the helicopter. Nail ripped his hands free.

  “Smitty, you’re on your own,” he snapped as he broke into a full run toward where he last saw Sharon entering the woods. He experienced a flash of déjà vu—of his desperate and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reach Jamie in time. He mustn’t fail again.

  Could fate be so cruel?

  To his astonishment, Smitty remained at his heels when he reached the forest shadows.

  “They’ll think I helped you escape,” he panted. “They’ll kill me too. There’s a clearing straight ahead.”

  Nail ducked and dodged through the trees and, sure enough, quickly approached the edge of a clearing. Sunshine washed it in bright summer radiance. Across its center burbled a stream from out of the mountains. Nail heard the howling of their pursuers behind him.

  Ahead, Sharon knelt on her knees by the brook with four Green Shirts surrounding her. She was looking up directly into Forbis’ eyes, defiant to the end. Nail had never met a woman with that kind of courage. Forbis pressed his pistol against her forehead. One of the cadets, perhaps more squeamish than the others, walked off with his back to the developing scene.

  She had seconds left to live.

  Nail dropped to one knee to use his uplifted leg as a brace. It was a long shot, even for an expert marksman. For Sharon’s sake, his first shot had better be good.

  He squeezed the trigger. The Glock bucked in his fist.