Shoreline

by Carolyn Baugh

  “What’s going on then?” She wished desperately that EMS would arrive and they could process the bikers. Until then they were mired there on the farm. Her thoughts went to Pete at the compound.

  Ford looked at the screen and then back at them, his face grave. “I think we just poked a bear.”

  “By not letting Act One go down as planned?” Nora asked.

  Chid was nodding. “Of course. Of course this will make him crazy.”

  “Crazier,” Derek said.

  “What? What’s happening?” Nora demanded.

  “You’re not going to like it,” Ford said grimly.

  “Of course I’m not,” Nora retorted. “Go.”

  “There will be a live webcast showing an execution.”

  Nora snatched the phone out of his hand, making Derek Ford flinch. There was a PowerPoint slide that read, Second Day, Act Two, Execution of the Enemy.

  “I guess that’s what they thought would get us there in force,” Chid was saying.

  “What’s that mean?” she asked them.

  Chid shook his head. “Is it one enemy or a collective use of the term enemy, so meaning both of them? Or all of us?”

  Nora felt faint, and she returned the phone to Ford’s hand.

  He added, “There’s an invitation to watch on live feed for all members of the group all across the country.”

  “Enemy. Enemy … which enemy?” Nora asked. “Pete? April?”

  Derek shook his head again. “Impossible to tell. It might be someone new.”

  “Is it a reaction to what just happened or something new? Some new person taken hostage?”

  Derek shook his head again. “Impossible to tell,” he repeated maddeningly.

  “How much time? And don’t say impossible to tell.”

  “No, that part’s clear.” Ford nodded at the small screen. “Twenty minutes.”

  Nora gaped and actually turned around in a circle. Then she said, “Can you send the link to Anna?”

  Ford nodded, tapping on the screen. “I’m doing it now; I also sent it to Sanchez—Hostage Rescue Team. But I still don’t think they can get access.”

  Nora ran over to where Ben was still standing over Tattoo-Neck. “We have to streamline this. We have to go. We have to get to Pete and April,” she said, panting.

  He looked a question at her and she filled him in.

  “Call your boss,” he said simply.

  “But—”

  “Call her.”

  Nora looked at him, her chest rising and falling, then she cast an angry glance at the handcuffed biker. Reluctantly, she punched in Sheila’s number.

  “Sheila, you heard from Ford? Anna told you what’s going on?”

  “Nora, finish processing the people you’ve just picked up. CIRG is on deck here, they’re doing everything they can.”

  “Sheila, it really looks like the hostages are in mortal danger—”

  “Nora, did you wrap things up out there? You know how the AUSA is about details.”

  “But I think that—”

  “I’ll expect a full report,” Sheila said. The line disconnected.

  Nora looked at Ben despondently.

  He shrugged. “Okay, then. You did your best. She isn’t hearing you.”

  “But Pete—”

  “Even if you drove like a bat out of hell, which is inconceivable for you, we would not get there before twenty minutes—or now, fifteen—is up. It’s not possible. We are spectators for this one, Nora, I’m sorry. Now, open your car door and start filling out the arrest forms for the lady with the braid. Explain why you kicked her legs out from under her so that your alternate viewpoint is there when she alleges police brutality.”

  She groaned, feeling like a recalcitrant teenager, and yanked open the door to her car. She tugged her laptop out from under the seat and switched it on. “I hate this job so much,” she said.

  “You do not,” Ben corrected. “You hate rules and paperwork. Which makes you one of the good guys.”

  Nora considered this, darkly and grudgingly, as she called up the necessary forms. Occasionally she shot a glance over toward Chid and Derek who seemed to be pulling themselves away from the crowd at the barn little by little.

  As she filled out the forms, she realized that Derek’s ability to take the stories of the migrant workers was an immeasurable service. None of them could really talk to a news crew without risking exposure. Maybe Derek’s small interviews would be their one chance to talk to someone in authority about the day the white folks came to kill them.

  Nora tapped reluctantly on the keyboard.

  “I need my computer,” Ford said, as both he and Chid entered the car. Soon enough they were bent over their keyboards, tapping furiously.

  Nora soon had her report filled out and filed, then, anxiously, she got out of the car and paced next to Chid’s open door, watching the EMS techs confer with the police. There were now six squad cars in front of the barn and she saw that a press van was attempting to enter the driveway, only to be deterred by a police officer.

  She listened to the tapping on the keyboard and tried to regulate her breathing. Each man would have a burst of activity and then thump the Enter key. Nora started using this as her cue to inhale deeply.

  My brain is so foggy.…

  “Make them wrap it up faster,” she said to Ben.

  “I’ll see if I can hurry it along.” He walked over to speak to the officers. She saw him motioning to the man they had cuffed, asking them to take him into temporary custody until federal agents could do so. They could not afford to divert their one vehicle for that purpose at this point. Next, Ben engaged in conversation with the EMS techs. Again he gestured toward the man in the field.

  The morning heat became intense. Nora felt sweat dripping all along her back and pooling under her arms. She wanted to wriggle out of the blazer and, more so, out of the Kevlar that was pressed against her skin. She sighed.

  She paused in her pacing to look hard at Chid. “Okay. So.”

  He turned his head to return her gaze.

  “Yes, Nora?” He looked harried and rather like he didn’t want to talk to her at all.

  “How many Acts today?” she asked.

  His face was grave. “Siegfried. Three Acts.”

  “Who’s Siegfried?” she asked.

  “Eponymous hero of the third opera in the cycle,” Chid answered. “The boy too stupid to have fear. He learns fear when he learns to love.” Chid looked at Nora trying to assess her reception of this. “I can say more.…”

  “Yeah, that’s plenty,” she said, irritated.

  Chid demurred.

  “Would executing Pete and April Lewis be one act or two?”

  “I don’t know,” Chid answered, his eyes bleak.

  “Well what is it in the opera?” demanded Nora.

  “Look,” Chid said, barely masking impatience once again. “Wagner himself only barely paid homage to the Norse tales that shaped the Ring. For expediency’s sake, this guy is going to shape this story however he likes. He already has.”

  She frowned at him, then looked away, frustrated. Finally she asked, “How does it end, Chid? I mean, you said this guy Wotan burned down the house of the gods. He was a god, right?”

  Chid nodded. “Comic book fans might recognize him as Odin.”

  “So he died, then? When Valhalla burned?”

  Chid drew in a long breath and withdrew his fingers from the laptop. “It was all predicted, as any good tragedy is. So Wotan was originally content to die thinking that Siegfried would take over. Metaphorically…” He gestured loosely to the handcuffed Patriot and the barn beyond. “Perhaps we can look at all these legions as Siegfried. Though it would be more convenient to find Wotan a grandson. Baker, maybe? Siegfried was the product of an incestuous union.”

  “White militias and incest. Shouldn’t be hard,” Ford chimed in. He had reconnected the iPhone to the nameless nurse’s charger.

  “Again, though, you�
�re taking it too literally,” Chid insisted. “It’s a ridiculous story. Geyer’s not going to take it blow-by-blow. He’s using it as a vessel.”

  “Ugh, then why bother?” Nora said, frustrated.

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out here,” retorted Chid, losing his cool and raising his voice. “It would really help if we could find the actual person who’s calling himself Geyer. I don’t think we can fully sort out his intent til then.”

  “Just give us a second, Nora,” Derek Ford said softly. “There are a lot of posts coming in about the barn and not all of them are positive. There might be a break in the ranks going on.… I’m trying to monitor.…”

  Chastened, Nora began texting Anna. Any word?

  —CIRG asst dir has Enhanced SWAT at the ready. HRT continuing to try to talk to Baker.

  Nora sighed and darkened the screen.

  The waiting was almost more than she could bear.

  Ben walked over. “I need counter-signatures, here, here, and here,” he said.

  Nora shook her head, disgusted. “There’s just no time for this.…”

  Ben was starting to lose patience. “Look, I get how worked up you are. I would be, too. But you can’t forget that if we don’t process these guys right, there’s a chance that they could walk away. We have to do it by the book, Nora. You know this. It’s all we’ve got to ensure that a little justice comes out of this.”

  Nora listened and then signed without looking at him. Finally she turned her eyes on him. “I’m sorry, I’m being a brat, I know.”

  “No, you’re just being a loyal friend. But at some point you have to realize that there’s productive and non-productive behavior. There are twenty people out at that compound, Nora. Trust them to handle it.”

  Ford said, “Whether they are or not, the live feed just came on.”

  They all clustered around the screen, Nora and Ben peering in from either open door of the car, squinting to discern the action.

  Gabriel Baker appeared, and Nora instantly recognized the inside of the barn where she had been held. It was hard to divine from the camera angle how many people were in the room. The camera’s main focus was on Baker himself. Others who appeared had their backs toward the camera, faces turned toward their leader. Nora saw rifles on their shoulders and open-carry holsters at their sides. Some milled about, blurs of camouflage and cold gray metal.

  Baker wore a pistol in a holster and a navy polo shirt, unbuttoned to expose the curl of his pale blond chest hair. Nora stared at the wedding ring on his finger and found herself wondering who the woman could be, and how they spoke to each other, and what it was like to interact with … defer to?… a man like Gabriel Baker. Did she live in fear of him? Did he live in fear, like Pete said, and the guns were the only sense of power he could retain?

  Baker cleared his throat, then raised his hands for silence.

  Friends, we are at a crossroads. I have issued a call, inviting my brothers and sisters in the militia movement to share with us in this moment, to share in our revolution, to go forward hand in hand.

  Today our soldiers went to fight the cause of illegal immigration at the front, the cause that, more than any other, is dragging our country down into perdition. Our soldiers went to begin to reclaim our country for its citizens but they were thwarted by the forces of the federal government. Typical. Typical that the feds will protect illegals over our own people.

  I say, there is no place for fear unless we are fearing the enemies at the gates, the enemies of our traditions and cultures.

  No more.

  We are forging ahead, setting up a model for action, definitive, sure, irreversible action in which citizens are no longer passive victims. No, this is a model for strong, independent citizens, lemmings no more, violated no longer by a system that caters only to the elite, to the New York liberals, to the Washington insiders, the compromisers, those who placate, those who surrender, and those who would take our guns in order to take our tomorrows.

  Thunderous applause went up from the spectators.

  The camera zoomed in on Baker who was smiling widely, exhibiting strong, even teeth.

  I say—and please pay attention now—we have promised you Fourteen Acts that will shake this corrupt system to its foundations. We do this so that it can fall and then rise anew out of the ashes of sin, cleansed by fire. We have promised you Fourteen Acts that will shame this nation into realizing how far astray it has gone.

  Now. We took this negro into custody.

  The crowd shifted, murmuring, as April Lewis was led into the room. The same pink tunic Nora remembered was now far dirtier, and Nora was aghast to see blood stains on it. April’s face was battered. One eye was nearly swollen shut.

  We have been helping her to find humility. She came to us pompous and cocky. She was presuming to rule over whites, forgetting her rightful place, forgetting the mud out of which she rose.

  He turned his attention on her. You want to lead, girl? You want to wear this mass of dreadlocks into the halls of power? When you should be cooking my meals, working my fields? The man who propelled her from behind now was attempting to force her onto her knees. But April Lewis was not going quietly.

  With shaking hands, Nora called Anna. “They’re in the barn, Anna—the furthest west of the three. Anna, they’ve got April Lewis, they’re going to kill her—tell Schacht, tell Sheila—you’ve got to send the SWAT in, you’ve got to!”

  Despite the fact that April Lewis was not bowing before him, Baker attempted to continue his speech. His smile was slightly less assured, though, as he tried to keep the microphone from picking up on her furious comments.

  Others fear you, Baker was saying. I do not. Others will defer to you. I will not. I know where I come from, and I know my role. And my role is to make sure that there are no more like you, rising from the mud to pretend to be other than what they are—

  It was at that point that April Lewis spat directly into his face.

  Without another word, Gabriel Baker wrenched the pistol from its holster, held it to her forehead, and fired.

  * * *

  Nora screamed, and Ben, Chid, and Ford shouted in protest. From among the strawberry plants, the tattoo-necked biker laughed derisively.

  “He killed her, he killed her!” Nora screamed again, feeling a hair’s length from devolving into hysterics.

  Ben came around behind the car and clutched her by the shoulders. “Easy, easy, you have to stop screaming! Breathe! Breathe!”

  Nora looked desperately at him and then sank into him, sobbing. “We saw it. We didn’t stop it. We just watched. Ben, we just watched.…”

  “There’s nothing we could have done, Nora. Nothing. There’s nothing we could have done, I swear.” Ben held her hard, the palm of his hand open fully around her head, pressing her head to his chest.

  But Nora pulled her head away from him, unable to keep from looking at the screen despite the tears crowding her eyes.

  She saw that the cameraman had chosen to zoom in on Baker. Nora wondered at the move, trying from a distant corner of her own fear to analyze it. Would the sight of April Lewis’s corpse gushing life onto the floor of the barn disgust and thus repel the viewers? Or would it incite Baker’s followers to engage in activities other than those he had so carefully planned out for them?

  Chid seemed clearly to be thinking the same thing. He looked at Nora, his gaze heavy. “I think Pete, like it or not, will now be the day’s Act Three. It will need to be much more dramatic than originally intended. Baker inadvertently showed weakness. They will have to engineer his execution from a point of indisputable strength.”

  “Do you think they’re cleaning up?” asked Ford.

  Chid nodded. “Wouldn’t you? A little? Before staging the next one? Maybe there’ll be a change of venue even.”

  Nora felt bile rise in her throat. Ben held her gaze, centering her.

  Ford said, “For now, though, there doesn’t seem to be anything happening. They’
re running a feed of PowerPoint slides of people training and, you know, these white power slogans.” He lowered the phone and they all moved back, taking some space.

  She sank her fingers into the flesh of Ben’s arm. “Ben, we’ve got to wrap this up and get out of here.”

  He nodded, his green eyes wide, and took the paperwork he had brought from EMS and started jogging it back to the ambulances.

  Derek Ford watched her carefully. “Are you alright, Nora?”

  Nora looked at him and at the cell phone in his hand. She thought of April Lewis, flirting with Pete and teasing them for being “spectacularly bad” at rescue efforts. She shook her head. “No. We have to go. Now.” She opened the door of her car and sank into the passenger seat, then gestured at Tattoo-Neck. “Derek, please, you and Chid get this.…” Words failed her. “Please just get him into the back of a squad car and let’s go.”

  Both men exchanged glances and then stood up and complied with her request, Derek unplugging the iPhone and tucking it carefully into his pocket. She spied the glow of the screen through the navy material as he got out of the car.

  Nora found herself texting Rachel. What do you know about Wagner?

  As she waited for a response—and she truly had no idea what she thought Rachel could do for her—she stared at the endless emerald fields and the impossibly blue lake beyond them. It was, she thought grudgingly, one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen. Her memory drifted back to the desert-lined road that stretched between Cairo and Alexandria on the Mediterranean Sea. She recalled the long hoses that snaked along the parched earth, dripping precious water onto frail little fruit trees. Why is one person’s field lush and fertile and another’s barren and lifeless?

  Rachel’s text came through: MMMMM. Bad boy. Gorgeous music. What’s up?

  —What if I told you the white supremacist bad guys are using the Ring Cycle as a framework for all these acts of terror?

  Huh?

  —Sequencing acts of terror with acts of the opera. We’re on the second day now. Bracing for the third.

  Shit. Lot of fire in the third …

  —So I’ve been told. Was Wagner really this wicked?

  The wait this time made Nora fidget as she watched the tiny ellipsis float across the screen to indicate that Rachel was typing.