Election

by Brandt Legg

  “You’ll be getting it from all sides,” the campaign manager had told him. “You’re a great debater—best I’ve ever seen—but the competition aren’t amateurs, and, all together, they could take you.”

  By October, with the second debate just days away, and Hudson still riding high in almost every poll, he scored several important endorsements—a well-known Republican senator, a congresswoman, and a few local police unions. But the big one came from the governor of Iowa. They received word of the nod from the governor’s aide while campaigning in Colorado.

  “We’ve got to get back to Iowa,” Fitz said as Hudson came off stage from a rally.

  “He’s endorsing us?” Hudson asked excitedly.

  “Hell yes!” Fitz had been working on it for months. “He wants to announce it tomorrow. He’s giving some big education speech and wants you there. We may even be able to use this to get the Teachers Union back on board.”

  Hudson nodded. As a former teacher with golden school board credentials, he was set to become one of the first Republicans ever endorsed by the Teachers Union, but ever since he’d suggested a hybrid of home/internet and teacher-based alternative education, the big union had soured on him. Iowa’s governor, also a friend of the union, meant the huge impact of his endorsement could also help them get back into the good graces of the union’s executive board.

  “We’re going to let the campaign bus go on ahead. It’s too slow on these mountain roads; we’ll never make it in time,” Fitz said. “You, Florence, and I will take a car. Vonner’s sending a plane, which should be at the airport before us.”

  “Okay,” Hudson said. “Hope I can sleep on the plane.” He’d never been good at sleeping in the air, but exhaustion and necessity had taught him several new tricks.

  Hudson, Florence, and Fitz sat in the back of a large SUV along with a Secret Service agent. Another two agents sat in the front seat, one of them driving. Security was tight. They also had lead and follow cars, each with two additional agents, plus drivers.

  “Hey, who’s the new Secret Service agent?” Florence asked.

  The agent turned and smiled at them. “I’m agent Bond.”

  “Agent Bond? Are you kidding me?” Hudson asked.

  “No, I’m not a kidder.”

  Florence laughed. “We have an Agent Bond protecting us.”

  “What’s your first name?” Hudson asked.

  “James.”

  “Incredible.” Hudson laughed, too. “Your name is James Bond?”

  “No. I was joking about the James part. My name’s actually Trent.”

  Florence laughed again. “He really is funny.”

  “No, seriously, I’m not.”

  “Ha! He did it again,” Florence said. “‘Seriously not funny.’ Trent Bond, you’ve just become my favorite Secret Service Agent.”

  Bond gave a slight nod and just the hint of a smile. “Honored.”

  Florence had received a text from Schueller earlier that day with highlights from his most recent college appearance. He’d been enlisted by the campaign to get out the youth vote. His charisma, authenticity, singer/songwriter persona, and social media presence had made him quite effective in bringing young people into his father’s cause.

  “I have to admit,” Hudson said, “I’m very surprised and impressed with your brother’s work on my behalf.”

  “He’s even shelved the conspiracy theories,” Florence added.

  “At least publicly.”

  “Damn, I can’t get a signal,” Fitz interrupted. “Mountains do nothing but get in the way. I’m looking forward to getting back to Iowa where at least my phone works.”

  Hudson smiled at Florence, who was about to laugh at the campaign manager. At that moment, she’d been admiring the view. A river snaked through a canyon five hundred feet below them. The golden leaves of aspens and cottonwood trees fluttered in the sunlight.

  BOOOOM! BOOM!

  The car right in front of them suddenly exploded. The driver of their SUV swerved to void the flaming debris, but it was too late. The inferno swallowed them, as if they had driven into a burning barn.

  “Dad!” Florence screamed as they careened off the road.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Hudson saw the panic in his daughter’s eyes, and wondered if it would be the last time he’d ever see her. Blinded by black smoke and engulfed by expanding flames, their driver lost control of the vehicle. Suddenly, the toxic storm which had trapped them cleared. For that split second, Hudson thought they might be okay. Then he heard Fitz scream, and realized the reprieve had occurred only because their SUV was flying through the air.

  His whole world swirled as he tried to reach for his daughter. The accelerated G-force of their flight made it incredibly difficult. At the same time, Fitz was yelling something, but it all blended into a slow-motion kaleidoscope of fear and agony. The crunch and grind of trees gouged the vehicle and smashed windows as a rapid descent pushed them down, down.

  My God, how far down can we go?

  Hudson recalled seeing the seemingly bottomless canyon as they were heading up the pass.

  We’re going to die.

  The sounds of crunching, twisting metal grew louder than the snapping wood as giant trees caught the airborne vehicle and forced it to stop. A hard, violent stop. Airbags inflated all over the place. Grunts and screams. Oomph. Hudson flew into something, or something hit him. Glass had come in on them like a hurricane. Everything moved fast, scraping, grinding, spinning, another snap, and then eerie stillness. Total, loud, deafening silence.

  Hudson felt as if he had lost consciousness, but he hadn’t. A catastrophe so horrific could not be real. He reached up instinctively, but that went backwards, or rather upside down. Maybe both. His hand found flesh. He thought it was Florence’s ankle, but nothing was sure. The vehicle interior was shrouded in a strange darkness. Twisted in the lower trunks of trees, deep under a thick canopy of evergreen, the canyon was smothered in shadows. His brain was not working quite right. Every move brought more pain. And the glass, as if they were in a pool of it—diamond-like chunks.

  “Daddy . . . ”

  The sound of his daughter’s voice pulled him from his despair.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, desperately celebrating that she was alive, his tone begging that she was not seriously hurt.

  “I think I am. You?”

  He realized he was sprawled over the back of one of the seats. Nothing fit. The vehicle had been so mangled that half of it lay upside down while the rest of it tilted sideways, suspended, the driver’s compartment above them. Hudson tugged and tore, straining with all his strength, and somehow got himself turned around. He saw Florence, blood on her face, pain in her eyes, then smelled the smoke.

  “Smoke!” It quickly filled the area. Choking, blinding. “We’ve got to get out.”

  “Where?” she cried.

  It seemed impossible in such a small space, but there was no clear escape. With fading visibility, and the disorientated way they’d landed, they were trapped. He coughed and rolled onto the inverted ceiling. Florence was coughing, too, and then he heard Fitz cough, and maybe another. What was the agent’s name? Jim? Phil? He couldn’t remember.

  “Fitz!”

  “Yeah, I’m alive. Unless this is hell.”

  “Me too,” Agent Bond said in a strained voice. “I’m at the window, but it’s partially blocked.”

  “Where’s the smoke coming from?” Hudson asked.

  “Fuel,” Fitz said urgently. “This thing could blow any minute.”

  They scrambled and contorted themselves until Florence found a way out through the opening that used to be the back window. One by one, they dropped through thick brambles. The SUV, dangling four feet above the ground, had rammed in between two massive trunks, as if the trees had grown through the painted steel. Agent Bond was the last to pull himself out, mostly falling to the ground, where he screamed and collapsed.

  Florence, her nursing instinc
t taking over, jumped over to him.

  “My leg,” Bond moaned, but it was the blood that worried her.

  “Hang in there, 007,” Florence said, while checking his injuries. His condition was serious. “You’re going to be okay,” she lied.

  The smoke increased. The smell of gas grew more intense.

  “It’s gonna blow!” Fitz warned again. “We’ve got to get away!”

  Chapter Thirty

  It was the Wizard’s first trip back to Ohio in many years. He hated the place because of the memories, but he loved it, too, because of different memories. His escape from the Buckeye State hadn’t been easy for a poor kid with brown skin and no college, but finally, in the early 90s, he hitchhiked west with nothing but what fit in his backpack—mostly books, a few clothes, and a computer he’d built from parts he’d scrounged. Even with his brains, work was tough to get, but by the turn of the century, Silicon Valley was so high-throttle that even an oddball without an engineering degree could get a job writing code. It wasn’t enough to afford housing, but the Wizard honed his skills and made lots of contacts. Now, he was back in the town where he grew up because things that happened there decades earlier had forced him to return.

  He and Gouge sat in the cheap motel room, pizza boxes and empty Chinese food containers strewn about. The Wizard looked at the monitor of his laptop and shook his head.

  “What is it?” Gouge asked.

  “Proof.”

  Gouge nodded, but didn’t bother to check the Wizard’s screen. He never did understand computers all that well, and even if he did, the kind of codes the Wizard dealt with gave him a headache. “Is it enough to convince Dawg?”

  “It ought to be,” the Wizard replied, not looking up. “But I’m not sure he wants to know.”

  “Remember that movie with Nicholson and Cruise?” His voice got lower and louder. “You can’t handle the truth!”

  “Yeah.” The Wizard leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “It’s like that. And in this case, not many people can handle the truth.”

  “But the truth is the truth,” Gouge said, shaking his fist as if to empower the word tattooed below his knuckles.

  The Wizard’s eyes followed the movement of Gouge’s hand. He’d seen the tattoo before, and knew why he’d gotten it. The Wizard had the same tattoo, only his was permanently burned onto his brain where no one could see it, but he felt its sting every day.

  “Dawg wants to be president,” the Wizard said, turning back to the screen. “And when someone wants to be president of the United States, the truth just gets in the way.”

  Gouge lit a cigarette. “That’s good, though. We want him to be president. It’s the only way we can make things right for Rochelle.”

  The Wizard looked at his old friend, eyes squinting, as if seeing the past in the gray-blue exhale of smoke from Gouge’s Marlboro. Two ashtrays already overflowed with butts. The motel room, Gouge’s temporary home, was bigger than the Wizard’s storage shed, but it felt much smaller. “It’s not exactly going to make it right.”

  “I know, but damn if it’s the closest we’re ever gonna get.”

  “At what price?” the Wizard asked. “Dawg’s life?”

  “Come on,” Gouge said, flicking ash onto his jeans, then rubbing it into the dirty faded denim.

  “What do you think’s going to happen when Dawg doesn’t do what they want?”

  Gouge looked puzzled.

  “Sure, they’ll manipulate him for a while into following their agenda,” the Wizard said. “They may even let him think he’s making his own decisions, but you know Dawg. One day he’s going to decide something’s wrong, he’s going to want to do something they don’t, and that’s when the trouble will start.”

  “You think they’ll kill him?”

  “I do. Either that, or they’ll drum up some kind of scandal to remove him from office, but that can be long, messy, and unpredictable. They don’t like that kind of thing. My guess is a quick assassination or a sudden heart attack. Maybe a brain aneurism.”

  “Nice,” Gouge said sarcastically. “But what if he plays along with them?”

  “Dawg, play along? Are you joking? Nah, man, Dawg’s a patriot. He believes in right and wrong. Dude treats history as a religion. He’ll fight them . . . and he’ll think he can win.”

  “Maybe he can.”

  The Wizard looked back at his screen and shook his head. “No. It’s too big. No way Hudson Pound walks out of this alive.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  “I’m still workin’ on that one,” the Wizard said. “It’s profound, though. It’s warping my holographic mind and stressing my interactive consciousness.”

  “What if he wins, deals with Rochelle and a few other things, and then shocks everyone by resigning before they can stop him? Claims a health issue or maybe—”

  “I’ve been thinking about something similar, but it’ll only work if Dawg believes the proof.”

  “Why wouldn’t he? Proof is proof, right?” Gouge said, shaking his fist again.

  “You’re confusing proof with truth. Maybe in the movies that works out, but in the real-world, proof and truth only have one thing in common. They’re both moving targets, and the more you look at one, the blurrier it gets.”

  “What is the proof, then?”

  “That we’re at the final CapWar.”

  “What’s a CapWar?”

  “A CapWar is everything that’s choking the material world.” The Wizard stared hard through bloodshot eyes into the screen. “And this one is out of control.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Hudson looked up through the heavy smoke. “What about the other agents that were in the front seat?”

  Fitz stared at the mangled mess of steel above them. “They can’t be alive.”

  “We’ve got to find out,” Hudson said, already climbing up through a tangle of splintered tree limbs.

  “Damn it, you’re going to get us killed,” Fitz said, reluctantly following him.

  Florence, ignoring the blood running down her own cheek, tore strips from Bond’s shirt to staunch his bleeding.

  “My leg?” he asked.

  “Broken,” Florence replied flatly, “but that won’t matter if we don’t get this wound closed soon.” The major gash in his left side continued to pump blood.

  At the same time, Hudson and Fitz, both bleeding and dazed, reached the guys in the front seat. The agent in the passenger seat was mashed into what used to be the windshield. A folded part of the hood pinned him in. Neither answered when Hudson shouted to them.

  “Let’s get out of here!” Fitz yelled, coughing.

  They both knew the smoke meant fire. Any second the fuel would ignite and engulf the whole vehicle. Images of Senator Uncer’s firebombed car flashed through Hudson’s mind.

  “This one’s breathing,” Hudson said about the passenger. Looking at the other man, the driver, Hudson grimaced. The driver’s skull had been split open. He could not have survived, but Hudson, reached across to check his pulse anyway.

  Fitz looked past Hudson to the driver. “Oooh God, forrr-get him. He’s dead.”

  No pulse.

  They worked frantically to pull the passenger free.

  “It’s the damned seat belt,” Hudson said. “I can’t reach the buckle.”

  “We’re going to have to leave him,” Fitz wheezed.

  “No. Do you have a knife?”

  “Why the hell would I have a knife?”

  Hudson stretched and grappled. “Got it!” He’d miraculously found the button and released the buckle. The agent’s body came down on top of Hudson, who, in turn, slid into Fitz. The three tumbled back to the ground, with Fitz taking the worst of it.

  “Florence,” Hudson called, climbing out of the pile-on, “can you do anything for him?”

  “Hold this,” she said, pushing the saturated cloth into Bond’s hand, briefly meeting his eyes to be sure he understood if he let it go, he would bleed out.


  He tried to nod.

  “Save your energy, 007.” She moved toward her father. “Dad, your arm.”

  “It’s nothing.” Badly cut in the crash, his struggle to get the belt undone had resulted in a fresh gash.

  “Come on,” Fitz shouted, dragging the agent they’d rescued. “We’ve got to get away from this vehicle now!”

  “Okay.” Hudson looked at agent Bond, and then back to Florence.

  She shook her head—007 wasn’t going to make it. “He shouldn’t be moved until paramedics get here.”

  Hudson shot her a look with his eyes as if to say, When will that be?

  “I can do it,” Bond said.

  Florence wasn’t going to argue, Bond was dead either way, but she went back to assist his efforts while Hudson helped Fitz move the unconscious agent they’d rescued from the front seat.

  “What about the other cars?” Hudson asked breathlessly as they struggled through the underbrush.

  “There can’t be anything left of the lead car,” Fitz said. “We’re damned lucky the follow car didn’t land on top of us.”

  Amid the blood, smoke, and death, Hudson had a hard time considering being lucky, except that Florence had survived. But for that grateful miracle, he gave credit to something more powerful than luck.

  “We’ve got to get to the road,” Hudson barked.

  “We’re safer in the cover of the trees,” Fitz said. “We need to protect you. NorthBridge may want to finish the job.”

  For the first time, Hudson realized that this had been an attempt on his life. I’m the cause of all this. “Let’s find the agents from those other vehicles! In the army, we don’t abandon the fallen in order to save ourselves.”

  “We’re not in the army,” Fitz argued.

  “You could have fooled me.”

  Somehow, Bond had gotten to his feet. It was slow going as he limped and sometimes crawled, but Florence was mostly dragging him. “No further,” she yelled to her dad. “He’s losing too much blood, and—”

  She dropped and covered her head instinctively as an explosion ripped through the air behind her. Their SUV, forty or fifty feet below them, burst into flames.