by D L Barbur
Finally, the hammer fell on a live round, and Hubbard was still. The last round had hit just under his left eye. Before, at the end of a gunfight, I’d felt a savage thrill of triumph. Now I just felt tired.
I turned around. The only people standing were my people. Burke had scooped up a gun from somewhere and was pointing it at Smith. All three mercenaries were on the ground, unmoving. I stumbled towards them, taking stock, and looking for Alex. Finally I saw her walk from around one of the vehicles with her medical kit slung over her shoulder.
The sun was so bright it hurt my eyes. We locked eyes across the parking lot and I stumbled towards her. My arm and chest suddenly hurt terribly, and I gritted my teeth to keep from throwing up. I looked down at the leg of my khaki colored pants. They were soaked from the waist to my knee with blood from my arm. I tried to remember how much blood a person could lose before it became a serious problem, but my recall was a little fuzzy.
I realized I’d stopped walking, and was standing there staring mutely at the ground. I looked up and saw that Alex was running towards me now.
It seemed unfair to make her do all the work, so I decided to move towards her. I took a step and the ground came up and hit me in the face before everything went black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
When I woke up, I was on my back on a table, looking up at an x-ray machine. The room smelled strongly of dogs. I realized there was an IV plugged into my arm and a bag of blood hung from a hook over my head.
“Where the hell are we?” I asked.
Alex’s face came into view. Her hair was tied back. She looked exhausted and beautiful.
“We’re in a veterinary clinic. It’s Sunday so it’s closed. We broke in. I need x-rays of your arm to figure out if you’re going to the hospital.”
“No hospital,” I mumbled. I thought about the people on Hubbard’s thumb drive. Once I was in a hospital, it would be way too easy to make me die in surgery or something.
“I’m trying,” she said. “This is the second time I’ve had to patch you up like this. I don’t want to do this again.”
“Ok, I’m in.” I heard Casey’s voice from across the room. I craned my neck to look at her. It hurt to move. She was sitting at the computer that controlled the x-ray machine. There was a heavy gauze bandage wrapped around her hand.
“The password was the clinic address, how lame is that?” Casey said. Her speech sounded a little slurred, and she looked glassy-eyed. I wondered what Alex had given her.
Alex sat down behind the terminal.
“Ok. How the hell does this thing work?” She started clicking through windows.
That did not fill me with confidence. There was a TV mounted to the wall over Alex’s head. The sound was muted but the screen showed an aerial view of Freedom Ranch. Both the ranch house and the hangar were burning.
“Ok,” Alex said. “I think I can make it take an x-ray.”
“Shouldn’t I have something to cover my, you know…” I made a vague gesture at my groin.
Alex looked irritated. “Casey?”
Casey rummaged around the room and finally came up with a lead-lined vest.
“I think the person running the machine is actually supposed to wear this?” Casey asked.
“Just put it on his balls,” Alex said as she clicked through menus on the screen.
Casey sat it down, none too gently and I exhaled.
“I got shot,” Casey said, holding her bandaged hand out. “Took my pinky off. I guess I didn’t use that one much.” Now that she was closer, I could tell she was thoroughly stoned on something.
“Where’s everybody else?” I asked.
“Dalton is driving Burke and that IT guy to Portland so she can hand him over to the US Marshalls. He’s singing like a canary. It’s all about Hubbard though.”
“And Hubbard’s dead,” I said. “Shit.”
“I copied the USB drive though,” she said. “It’s in the cloud now. I uploaded it.”
Something occurred to me. “Wait a minute. Dale’s hip is busted, and me, you and Robert have all been shot. Alex is the only person who isn’t hurt.”
“Well, her eardrum is busted, but I think mine is too.”
I realized we were all talking really loud.
“Ok Dent,” Alex said. “I need you to hold still while I get x-rays of your arm.”
I took a deep breath and sat back. I looked at the bag hanging from a hook.
“Hey, you aren’t giving me dog blood, are you?”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Dent.” I knew it was a stupid thing to say as soon as it came out of my mouth. She walked over to her bag, took out a syringe and stuck it in the port of my IV line.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Good night, Dent.”
For the second time that day, everything went black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The cabins at Oregon’s Silver Falls State Park weren’t bad, all things considered. I sat inside, looking out the window and trying not to worry about Alex. The sun was going down, and despite the heat of the day, I felt a chill. I pulled a blanket over my lap, both to keep warm, and better hide the pistol in my lap. Since I’d been shot, I’d had trouble feeling warm.
My arm was still in a sling. The bullet had barely nicked my humerus, causing some hairline fractures. If it had plowed right through the bone, I would have needed extensive reconstructive surgery, probably a metal rod and a long hospital stay where I would have been easy to find and vulnerable. Still, I should have received more attention than Alex had been able to give me. She’d kept the wound clean and let it heal, and now we were tentatively starting some physical therapy exercises she’d dug up off the internet. My chest was mostly healed, although I’d bear a nasty scar there as well.
It had been a long month. We’d moved from place to place all over the Pacific Northwest, going as far south as Northern California, and as far east as Montana, staying in campgrounds, state park cabins, and more often than not parked on some obscure forest service road. Our new home was parked out front: a ten-year-old camper van. We’d bought it off an aging hippie in Eureka California for cash. The inside smelled strongly of patchouli and faintly of burnt marijuana. We’d left the Grateful Dead stickers on the back as a form of protective camouflage.
Alex had been excited. I’d been dubious, but soon realized it was much better than crawling in and out of the tent with my busted wing.
The worst part of all this was the amount of time I’d had to think. We would drive for six or eight hours a day, with Alex spending most of the time behind the wheel, leaving me with nothing to do but scan the mirrors, looking for anyone who might want to kill us and ruminate. I’d had plenty of time to replay the events of the last few months in my head and plenty of occasions to sit and wonder what I could have done differently. It was rare for me to get more than a few hour’s sleep at a time. I’d wake up screaming, grasping at the blankets, or at Alex. My dreams were full of death and mayhem. I’d replay things that had actually happened: getting shot, cutting a man’s throat, being framed for trying to kill my partner. Sometimes my dreams would take real life and give it a twist. I lost count of the number of times I’d watched Alex die in my dreams. Sometimes I’d wake her up, just to make sure she was really alive.
The events at Freedom Ranch had been in the headlines for a few days. Congressional hearings were threatened. The FBI stonewalled. Through a series of leaks, press releases and fluff journalism pieces, a narrative was constructed where Marshall and Webb had only a peripheral association with the US Government, that had been terminated when they went off the reservation.
No mention was ever made of the money.
The Freedom Ranch raid first started to slip out of the headlines in favor of a scandal involving a US Senator and an intern, then there was a mass shooting in a shopping mall. I remember the first day I heard no coverage about the raid at all and started realizing it was going to go down the memory hole. After a few m
ore days it was done and over with, mentioned only on Internet sites frequented by conspiracy theorists and other cranks.
I shifted in my chair, trying to get comfortable. I’d tried to get back in the habit of reading, although it was hard to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. Most thriller novels seemed laughably unrealistic to me, I’d thrown more than one out the window of the van, thanks to a horribly unrealistic gunfight or something similar. I’d finally settled on old classic science fiction novels, stuff I’d read as a kid. Right now, it seemed like too much effort to get up and go across the room to get one.
At the crunch of tires on the gravel outside, my head jerked up. I’d been unaware that I’d dozed off. The pistol was still in my lap. I took it with me when I went to look out the window. Alex got out of a pickup truck and pulled on her right earlobe, our sign that everything was ok. She’d walked out to the main gate of the park to meet everyone. An SUV and a sedan pulled in behind the truck.
Everyone filed in and we all shook hands. Dale was walking, albeit with a cane. Robert had a limp but otherwise looked fit and healthy. Casey looked older somehow. She was wearing her trademark jeans and hoody, but her hair was now a nondescript shade of brown. There were lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there six months ago. She held her left hand close to her body, careful not to bump the still healing scar where her pinky had been.
Dalton didn’t look well. He still moved like an old man, thanks to the metal rod holding his leg together, and his face was puffy. I wondered if he’d been drinking. He shook my hand but didn’t quite meet my eyes.
Last, there was Burke. She’d lost weight, and she looked older too. She wouldn’t quite meet my eyes either, and I knew that was a bad sign.
We made the rounds of greetings, then all looked at Burke expectantly.
“I’m just going to get this over with,” she said. “There aren’t going to be any prosecutions.”
“The thumb drive?” Alex said.
Burke shook her head. “I’ve shown the Justice Department the data. They’ve let me know in no uncertain terms they aren’t going to prosecute.”
“Maybe a new administration?” Alex asked.
“Maybe. These people are embedded like ticks. I’m not sure that really matters.”
She looked around the room.
“We need to watch ourselves,” she said.
“That’s where I come in,” Casey said. She flipped open her laptop.
“The contents of the thumb drive are encrypted in over a thousand locations on the web. Starting right now, at least three of us need to go to this website once a week and type in a unique password, or the file gets decrypted and sent to all the major news outlets in the world.”
“Do they even care?” Dale said. “It seems like these people are bulletproof.”
“I think they’d rather the information doesn’t get out,” Burke said. “It could be… inconvenient.”
I thought about the trail of dead bodies we’d left behind us: Henry, Jack, Bolle, Eddie, the dozens of people who burned to death at Freedom Ranch. The best we could hope for would be to inconvenience some people.
“I need everybody to pick a password,” Casey said, and turned the laptop to face us. One by one, we each typed a password in twice.
“Can they hack this?” I asked.
“Maybe. I’ve also got encrypted USB drives for everybody,” Casey said.
That left the money. We’d entrusted most of it to Casey. She’d moved it into precious metals, bearer bonds, offshore accounts, and from there set up various dummy and shell corporations. We’d lost a significant amount of value in the process, but the money was now as clean as we could make it. Some of it she’d invested, and we’d all be able to draw a small amount every month under assumed names as employees of a dummy corporation. The fake identities she’d set up for us while using all of Bolle’s connections seemed to be holding up.
“Just don’t get arrested and fingerprinted,” she said. “And you really want to avoid facial recognition software.”
One of the few constructive things I’d done over the last few weeks was learning more about the surveillance state. We needed to stay away from major cities, but there were still vast, ignored swaths of the country where we could operate.
Casey had also set up ways for us to communicate: anonymous computer bulletin boards, shared email accounts where we could leave messages in the draft messages folder, classified ads, things like that.
“So that’s it,” she said. “I guess now we scatter.”
There was silence in the room for a minute. I felt a lump growing in my throat. I felt like I should say something, but I had to force myself to get the words out.
“I’m sorry it worked out this way,” I finally said.
“We got some licks in,” Dale said. “That matters.
“We have a couple million dollars,” Casey said. “And I didn’t get thrown out of a plane over the Pacific Ocean. Thanks for that dude.”
Dale pushed himself up out of his chair with his cane. “Well, I reckon we’ll head back to the ranch. My to-do list has been getting longer while I’ve been off on this little adventure.”
Of all of us, Dale and his family were the ones most at risk. He’d declared that he wasn’t leaving his ranch. He wouldn’t be hard to find. I was worried about him, but there was nothing I could do. I knew better than to try to change the old guy’s mind.
We all filed out of the cabin. Alex and I had spent one night there, so it was time to move on. Dale pulled a long, tweed-covered case out of his truck.
“Reckon I better give this to you, since it might be a while before we see you again.”
It took me a moment to realize it was my old Fender Stratocaster guitar. I’d stashed it at Dale’s house after my house was blown up.
I took it from him. “Thanks for everything Dale.”
He clapped me on my good shoulder. “You’re welcome. I’m going to give you some unasked for advice. You look like shit. Get some sleep, quit chewing on the past, and enjoy your time with that woman over there. You’ve got to know when to hang up your guns and walk away from the war.”
“Ok,” I said.
Then the old geezer did something I would have never expected. He hugged me, careful of my busted arm. It was quick, but he squeezed me hard before letting me go.
“After you get that arm healed up, and take a little vacation, come by the ranch. I’ll teach the two of you to ride a horse.”
“I’ll do it.”
With that, he maneuvered himself into the pickup. I put the guitar in the back of the van and climbed into the passenger seat.
Alex started the engine. “Where to?” she asked.
“Wherever you’re going.”
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