by C. G. Cooper
I didn’t say a word and neither did the rest of the church attendees. The man’s overgrown beard was as unruly as his hair, but it was his eyes that really stood out. Now, I’d seen crazy before. There were all kinds, from your run-of-the-mill “I don’t care about anyone but me” crazy, all the way up to full-blown psychotic. This guy gave a whole new meaning to the word crazy. It was obvious that he was living in his own little world, his wild eyes glistening with hysterical glee.
“You left me a note,” I said.
He looked confused for a moment. Then he snapped his fingers and smiled.
“Oh yes, I’d almost forgotten. I guess I got so caught up with my friends here,” he gestured to the choir, “that I temporally misplaced all thoughts of your compatriots.”
“Maybe it would be better to go outside to talk about this,” I said, hoping that the nut job would listen.
“I can’t do that. Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“I’m sure your friends wouldn’t mind if I took a couple minutes of your time.”
More whimpering from the choir. It was silenced immediately by a snap of the man’s head.
“No, you’ll just have to wait until Mass is over,” he said. “After all, we’re doing this for you. Well, for you and the bigwigs in the mountain.”
He wasn’t making any sense. Maybe a bullet in the head would solve his problem. It was obvious the lunatic had some hold over the congregation, but what?
“Sir, I would appreciate it if you followed me outside.” I said it calmly, but with authority.
My request was received with a maniacal cackle.
“Oh. You think you’re the one giving orders?” He was the only one laughing. “Well the joke’s on you, Mr. Patriot. The joke’s on you! They have you all fooled! Oh, Lord how they’ve fooled you! Can’t you see that it’s a conspiracy, a really fat, juicy conspiracy with a cherry on top?” He was really letting it go, like gasps of laughter.
I’d had enough. I raised my weapon, aligning the man’s head in my front sights.
“Get down on the ground,” I ordered, cutting through his laughter.
And just like that, the laughing fit was over. He looked at me through bloodshot eyes, the menace in his eyes shooting down the narrow aisle at me.
“You people think you know everything. Everything! You think you can put this country back together. You think we should hold hands and salute the flag. What if you’re wrong? What if that’s not what’s supposed to happen? What if we’re right and you’re wrong?”
“Who is we?” I interrupted, fearing a twenty-minute diatribe.
He stabbed a finger repeatedly in his temple.
“We are who we are. Can’t you see that? We are all around, even though you don’t want to believe. Believe!”
“Look, I’m just a lowly soldier. I’m sure if you come with me, we can get you in front of someone who…”
“No! No, no, no, no!” He was stomping around the podium now. “You don’t see. I see! Patriots. Ha! I’m a patriot!”
“Sir, with respect, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He stopped again, this time cocking his head when he looked at me. The examination lasted a full minute, maybe longer.
“You really have no idea, do you?” He was subdued now, like he’d found some mystery to be unraveled. “Well, Mr. Patriot, lucky for you, you happened to come to the right place. Would you like for me to tell you why?”
I nodded.
“Because I am one of none. We are who we pronounce ourselves to be. There is no us, only we.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it as soon as we let these people go.”
I’d been watching the parishioners out of the corner of my eye. They were trembling.
“Impossible. Utterly and entirely impossible,” the man said.
“Why?” I asked.
He smiled and then reached into his pocket. My finger tensed on the trigger.
“Because of this!” he exclaimed, holding a shiny metal remote in his hand. “Do you know what this is?”
“I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
He laughed. “You’re catching on, Mr. Patriot. This is a remote detonator. Do you know what it controls?”
I shook my head, playing along for now.
“Why don’t we ask the crowd?” he turned to the choir and I almost shot him, but something held me in check. I think it was his confidence, like no matter what I did, the action would be fruitless. “You.” He pointed. “You there in the front row. The little girl with the pee-pee pants.”
The girls couldn’t have been older than four. Her pants were soiled, and she tried to look away.
“I said, tell him what this controls!” the man screeched.
The little girl avoided the man, and her tiny eyes fell on mine, pleading.
“The bombs,” she said quietly.
“That’s right!” the man said, jumping up and down. “The bombs. And would you like to tell Mr. Patriot where the bombs are?”
“Under the chairs,” the girl answered, the words coming out in a whimper.
“Yes, yes! Under the chairs. Under all the chairs.” His attention swung back to me, his smile wide. “So, you see, Mr. Patriot, I’ll be the one calling the shots around here.”
I heard Pozy’s voice in my earpiece, “Take him out, Ryker.”
Then Fleck said, “Yeah, I can take care of the explosives.”
They both sounded confident. But I was the one staring at a lunatic, a lunatic who’d most surely rigged the explosives to blow if he was incapacitated.
“So tell me, Mr. Patriot, why did you decide to enlist? Not enough food? Got bored eating roots?”
“My kids got sick,” I said.
He seemed surprised by my honesty.
“And how many kids do you have?”
“That doesn’t matter.” He didn’t have to know everything.
He shook his head sadly. “I thought we had an agreement. I’m the one running the show, not you, remember?”
“Three kids.”
“How old?”
“Eight, six and two.”
“Ah. Children. It’s always the children, isn’t it? We want to make them strong, but they make us weak, so very weak. And a wife. Are you still married? Do you make love to her and hope to have more…”?
He never finished. He couldn’t with the bullet I’d put in his forehead.
His lifeless body slipped to the floor, and I ran forward. There was a collective gasp from the frightened crowd, like one final intake of breath. Then the beeping starting, loud and angry, followed by the recorded voice of the dead man lying in a pool a blood.
Your time has come. No longer will you be afraid. Now you will truly be free.
Chapter 24
The beeping went from loud to blaring. Add in the screams of men, women and children, and all of a sudden, you can’t hear yourself think.
“Get in here,” I told my team, but the order was unnecessary. They ran into the building from all points a second after the transmission went through.
“I’ve got this,” Fleck said with confidence, snatching the detonator from the crazy dead man’s hand and then began searching for the actual explosive.
“We’ve gotta get these people out of here,” I said to my team.
“Crap,” Pozy yelled in dismay. She’d immediately headed to the choir, already thinking the same as I had.
“What is it?” How could this get any worse?
“They’re all shackled,” she said, pulling at a chain attached to a little girl’s ankle.
“Then cut them out and get them outside.”
We had tools similar to mini-blowtorches. They were both faster and easier to use than bolt cutters. But, we were short on time, and getting everyone out was an impossibility.
My team didn’t care. They set to their tasks as soon as the words spilled out of my mouth. I saw one, and then another, parishioner run for the back door. I thought about yelling in
an attempt to quiet everyone. But, that wouldn’t have worked. One man trying to quell the panic of one hundred scared people was analogous to requesting a flamingo to stand its ground although a stampeding herd of wildebeest were bearing down it.
“Damn,” I heard Fleck say. When I went to check on what was causing his consternation, I saw the sweat streaming down his face. It was the first time I’d seen him nervous.
“How bad is it?” I asked, kneeling down so only he could hear me. There were more people streaming out now, the blaring beeps chasing them.
“I’ve seen worse,” he said, trying to sound upbeat, but there was real fear laced in his terse voice.
“How long do we have, ballpark?”
His fingers were working over a heavy black box with wires running in every direction. They had been cleverly and expertly concealed. They probably ran to every corner of the church. In my estimation, the explosion wouldn’t just kill us all, but would also leave a crater the size of a football field.
“This isn’t the movies,” Fleck said. “This could explode virtually any second.”
The beeps continued their shrill wail, cutting into my eardrums like spear tips.
I glanced around at the rest of the team, and at the innocents about to be eviscerated by a madman’s bomb. There wasn’t a thing I could do. We were all going to die. Yet, for some reason, my death seemed of such insignificance. I’d faced down the hangman on more occasions than I cared to remember. Was this finally my time? Even if it was, I’d be damned if I was going down without a damn good fight.
I did what I’d always done. I grasped at the eighty percent solution - the best bet I had at my disposal. From the depths of my subconscious, an inner solution surfaced, similar to a wise whale from the depths of the ocean, yawning as it breached the ocean’s surface to breathe in air.
“Move back,” I said with impatience.
Fleck looked up at me like I was crazy.
“I can do this,” he said. “It’s something new, something I’ve only heard rumors about really…”
Something new? New tech? A part of me filed that away for later, if I was still alive to think about it.
“Move, now!” I commanded with urgency.
Fleck put up his hands in surrender. Slowly, he came to a standing position.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, Ryker.”
I gave him a tight smile. “Semper Gumby.”
Then I aimed my weapon at the black box, and I fired.
Chapter 25
We didn’t die.
Let me say that again.
We did not die.
How was that possible?
Luck? Maybe.
Skill? Not really.
You’re thinking the same thing Fleck was, hell what everyone in the chapel was thinking. How did this guy, this no-name with a gun, how did he shoot a bomb and somehow make it stop beeping?
Had I ever disabled an explosive device before? No.
Had I ever watched someone disable a similar device? Only from like a mile away.
I’m no idiot. There’d been guys in the service who made a living disarming bombs, remote munitions and even robots. But that wasn’t me. Compared to those guys I was just another ground pounder without a lick of explosive sense.
So how had I done it? How had I once again snatched victory from the jealous jaws of defeat?
It was simple—my dad. He’s the one who’d saved me, who’d saved us.
You see, me and my dad didn’t have a lot in common. In fact, most of my early adulthood was spent doing everything possible to put distance between us. I was the ultimate twenty-something rebel, the kid who wanted nothing to do with his father’s dreams.
But we did share a love of weaponry and advanced tech. Before his death, he’d been in a position to know of the tech that, on one hand, could have revolutionized the battlefield for decades, and on another lead the cure for the most infectious diseases the world had ever known. It wasn’t just his position; it was his passion to seek solutions to the world’s problems. He was always telling me to find the simplest way to attack a problem.
Being a hard-headed seventeen-year-old, I formed my own interpretation to meet my needs. If I wanted to go out, I just left. If I didn’t want to do my homework, I paid someone to do it for me. In that way, I was very enterprising. Dad was never amused, and I hate to say that my antics hurt him in more ways than one, but at the time I didn’t know how else to act. Call it hormones. Call it pretty girls. Whatever. It took me years, too many years, to figure out that I truly was my father’s son. We were both stubborn.
But he’d just saved my life. He’d reached through the clouds and handed me my answer, or at least that’s how it felt. One little conversation had allowed me to disarm the bomb.
We’d gone fishing that day. It was a rare occasion, what with dad’s schedule. He’d bribed me into coming, promising a boatload of bass in exchange for my company. I went, and between pulling five and six pounders out of the lake, we discussed the only safe topic at the time, tech.
He told me about a new development that some engineers in Arizona had developed. It was essentially a tamperproof explosive device. I couldn’t recall the specifications, or even what it was called. I did remember that he’d told me a secret, something only he and a handful of engineers knew.
“I insisted they give us a way out,” he’d said, “a way to disarm it in the case it fell into the hands of the wrong people.”
At that time tech had overcome a plethora of issues regarding weaponry. From ballistic missile shields to advanced robotics, the world seemed to become safer. But that was just like dad. He wanted more safeguards. He’d seen too many American-made weapons fall into the wrong hands.
And that’s what I’d seen. He’d never shown me a picture, but he’d described it to a tee. And, there it had been, a small dimple in the bottom corner of the device. It was designed to look like a dent, something so innocuous that the user would never notice it. But there it was, the indentation that dad told me about.
“It’s as simple as putting a bullet through that mark.”
The words rang clearly in my head now, like he’d just whispered them in my ear. I shook my head in wonder. Sometimes it was the smallest things, the most random of conversations that saved your ass. I thanked Dad for that.
“Hey, is that thing dead?” O’Mack asked.
“Hell if I know,” Fleck answered, clearly perturbed. “Ryker’s the one with the magic bullets.”
O’Mack looked at me, then back at Fleck.
“Whatever. Let’s get these people out of here. I’m hungry.”
A short while later, we’d gotten everyone out and away from the church. Fleck kept giving me the “Who the hell is this guy?” look. Better to leave that alone for the time being. We had our hands full with ninety-six Boulder citizens who were now homeless and who’d been through probably the most harrowing event of their lives.
Some were in complete shock, following us like zombies, eyes blank, arms hanging limply at their sides. Other couldn’t stop thanking us. Then there were those who glared at us with blazing contempt, like we were the ones who told that crazy bastard to lock them down and blow them to smithereens.
It turned out that the crazy man wasn’t alone. The parishioners told us that there’d been a group of maybe twelve crazies two days before. No one could tell us the exact number, but ten to twelve seemed to be the consensus.
“They blabbered on and on about cutting numbers,” one woman said, holding onto my arm as we walked.
A young man, probably no older than twenty-five, told us that he’d been the first to see them. “They were ready for war,” he said. “Four or five vehicles were stacked with weapons and crates. I’ve never seen that much in my life.” He said it like he’d seen all manner of evil in his short time on Earth. He’d probably seen his fair share, but until you shipped off to war, or had been sent into the darkest corners of the world, you hadn’t seen an
ything.
By the time I had enough information to call HQ, the sun was directly overhead. We shared our water where we could, and only to those who needed it the most, but I told my team to save some for themselves. I had no idea what The General’s next orders would be, but the last thing we needed was to step off without water.
So while I tasked Pozy and Wallace to get teams of refugees together to find and treat water, I found a quiet spot under a distant tree to call in my report.
“What happened?” The General asked once we had gone through the predetermined authentication.
I rehashed the scene in the church, leaving out how I’d known what to do. All he needed to know was that the bomb was disarmed.
“Any civilian casualties?”
“Just the ones I reported before,” I said, meaning the trail of bodies we’d encountered leading up to the near massacre at the church.
“Good. Any idea where the rest of them went?”
“The people we saved seem to think they were heading east. I was about to take a look at some possible routes and come up with.…”
“That can wait,” he said. “I need you back here.”
That was news. He’d sent me and my team to Boulder to determine who was behind the dead team’s disappearance. The General had been very specific about tracking down the enemy.
But he was The General, and I was now under his command.
“Just me or the whole team?”
“Just you for now. Have your people stay with the refugees. Jasper’s got some flying transports en route, but that could take up to a day. I need you here ASAP. I’ve got a Viper coming to get you—the same one you flew out on.”
He was being vague on purpose. Something about his tone made me nervous.
“Sir, can I ask what this is about? I’d really like to stay with my team, if possible.”
There was a pause. I heard him exhale, and then The General said, “I’m under strict orders not to tell you until you arrive.”
Thoughts of the kids stabbed at me. Was it Jane? Had something happened to Jane?
“General, please tell me. Is it my family? Did something happen to one of my kids?”