Necrotic Earth

by SW Matthews

  “This guy found me!” Andy insisted.

  “He’s rich, and highly motivated. He’s looking for his son.”

  Andy shook his head. “Bash is highly motivated, and he’s the most dangerous man I’ve ever met. If anyone can find me, it’s him.”

  “Then why hasn’t he?” Piper challenged.

  “I don’t know, but we’re not safe here anymore! We’ve got to leave tonight. Now!” He rushed to the bedroom.

  Piper followed, more calmly, and found him pulling his duffel bag from the closet and throwing it on the bed. She grabbed his arm before he could start packing.

  “Just wait, dammit!”

  She waited for Andy to take a couple of breaths.

  “Now let’s just sit and think about this for a minute.”

  Andy took a few more breaths, then nodded. They sat on the bed.

  “Now,” she began as she reached over and held his hands in hers. “Let’s just go over the whole conversation and see if we can figure out what’s going on here.”

  Andy stared at the floor and shook his head. “I’m so flustered I can’t even remember what he said his name was.”

  Piper activated the commlink on her wrist. Immediately, electronic versions of their voices repeated an earlier conversation.

  “You think I’m stupid enough to call you if he had asked for you by name?”

  “No, of course not. You’re the smartest person I know.”

  “That’s right.”

  She stopped the playback and raised an eyebrow.

  “How did you…?” Andy asked, confused.

  Piper reached under his collar and removed the dime-size microphone she had placed there when he came into the office. She held it up for him to see before dropping it into her shirt pocket.

  “I was suspicious of the guy,” she explained. “And I can’t always hear what you’re saying in there.”

  They grinned at each other, and Andy leaned over and kissed her. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s listen to it.”

  They listened to the entire recording twice before discussing it.

  “If he wanted to turn you in, you’d already be gone,” Piper said.

  “Maybe his two guys are going to come get me during the night?”

  “Why? They could have easily taken you as soon as you walked in the door…”

  “Not that easily.”

  “And if they grabbed you at night, they’d have to hold you until Hoff came back to pick you up. That doesn’t make sense.”

  Andy nodded stiffly in agreement. “Fine.”

  “Plus, I don’t think this guy is military. For sure not UNA military. Definitely a strange guy, but I think he’s just a rich weirdo.”

  “Do you have any way to check him out?” Andy asked. “Any connections that might help?”

  She shook her head. “No, not if he isn’t navy, which he isn’t. If we went to the library in Ely, we might be able to get some information from the UNA database, or find a book about Braxton Incorporated, just to verify he works there, but we don’t have the time.”

  “If he’s not military, I don’t know why he would even care about me.”

  “True,” Piper agreed. “And keep in mind, he tried really hard to hire you before telling you he knew you. If his intentions were to arrest you, or scare you, he would have led with that.”

  “So I’m just a bargaining chip?”

  “His ‘ace in the hole,’ so to speak.” Piper smirked at her own joke.

  “So he came here because…”

  “Doc is a client,” Piper finished.

  “Right. We know where he is, and it wouldn’t be unusual for us to show up at his place.”

  Piper nodded. “You really think Doc would kidnap someone?”

  “No, but you know, the last time I was there I did see a little kid running around. I didn’t think much of it, and I just saw him for a sec. He looked like an albino. Skin, hair, totally white. Looked about four, maybe? But he wasn’t being held captive. He was just a happy little kid running around. I figured he was a patient or something. But now that I think about it, it seems like Doc’s deliveries have increased over the last year.”

  “They have—they’ve almost tripled. I guess this explains why. So, if this kid is at Doc’s, how did he even get there? I mean, you didn’t take him there.”

  “I don’t know. I guess Doc has other pilots he uses? Or maybe someone brought him by portage and canoe?”

  “So, there’s a little boy there, but we don’t know why, and we don’t know how he got there. Hoff is trying to get the boy back, and he’s offering a lot of money. He knows who you are, but we only know that because you threatened to not help him.”

  “Do you really think Doc kidnapped the boy?”

  “I wouldn’t think so, but… I don’t know. He and Gabby seem nice enough, but you never know. Or maybe he didn’t actually take the kid—maybe the kidnapper dropped him off there, for safekeeping or something.”

  “Maybe Doc doesn’t even know the boy was kidnapped.”

  Piper considered the possibilities. “Yeah, like taking in a foster kid or something.”

  “So you think Hoff is making a legit request?”

  “It seems like it, Andy. It makes sense why he would come here. It would be really difficult to find Doc if you were going in blind. It’s not our usual type of job, but we’ve done plenty of odd jobs in our time, haven’t we? I say we trust him for now.”

  “Okay, babe. Andy appeared to relax a little. He pulled the envelope of money from his back pocket and handed it over. “Count this, then put it somewhere safe.”

  She smiled and started counting.

  ***

  As Andy headed down the hill toward the lake, he was feeling better about the whole situation. He was more confident that Hoff wasn’t going to turn him over to the authorities, and he was sure that Doc, his friend for the past few years, wasn’t a kidnapper. He was just looking after the boy, probably thinking he was an orphan or something. He would trust Hoff for now. Trust, but prepare. He was already going over his checklist for the trip, including his own “ace in the hole.”

  Plus, this job would earn a lot of money, and he was happy to be able to provide for Piper. She had sacrificed a lot for him, and it was about time she started getting paid back. Maybe this was the beginning of better things for them. He was actually getting excited for the job.

  As he approached the dock, he admired the plane he had grown to love over the last eight years. Her paint job was due for an update, or at least a good scrubbing. The white on the bottom and the gray on the side of the hull was faded and dirty at the water line. The top of the craft had originally been painted black, but after all the years of operation and sun-bleaching, it was now a gray just a few shades darker than the sides. The wing assembly—attached to the upper midsection of the hull, with the two long tail booms protruding from behind the engines to support the twin tail assembly—had chipping paint in several locations.

  Andy, Piper, and Tuck had purchased the Loon shortly after arriving in Lakeland. At that time, the CanWing Dual-Usage Cargo plane, or C-DUC, had already had many years of hard use. The man they bought her from had abused the poor girl to the point that she could barely fly, and he had been willing to get rid of the decrepit craft for a song—which also happened to be their budget.

  It was exactly what they needed.

  It was true that she was old. She was even older than Andy and Tuck, by a few years. She had been manufactured in 2073 by the CanadianWing Company in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and was designed specifically for cargo hauling throughout the lakes and wetlands of the upper and eastern UNA, so she was perfect for their start-up transporting business. Andy knew he could fix her mechanical ills, and Piper could handle the electronics with ease, so they bought her and got to work. It had been a labor of love. Andy loved to fly, and Piper loved Andy, and she knew he needed to get back in the air.

  For several months, they worked day and night gettin
g the plane fully functional again. When Andy finally took his first flight, it was one of the greatest days of his life. He hadn’t been in the air for over a year, and the freedom of flying was a soothing balm for his battered spirit. A few weeks later the Loon was officially christened.

  In the years since, they’d made all manner of upgrades and modifications to the old bird. There was always something else they wanted to do. Currently Piper was working on a radar jamming system. It wasn’t a critical upgrade—the pirates in Lakeland were few and far between, not like in the Western Islands. Andy had worked out there, and knew firsthand how abundant pirates were in that area. There, the ability to disrupt radar detection was critical. But here in Lakeland, it was mostly just an excuse for Piper to have something to do.

  “Hello, beautiful,” Andy said, patting the hull.

  He filled the fuel tanks, then opened the side cargo door and stepped inside. It had been a very long time since he had cleaned up the interior of the cargo hold, and an enormous amount of clutter had accumulated. He decided to remedy that once he had gone through his checklists.

  He passed through the small passenger cabin and into the cockpit. It had room for three. Tuck always took the copilot’s seat, with Piper seated behind him—her station featured a collection of electronic screens, keyboards, switches, and dials—and finally, Andy took the heavily worn pilot’s seat.

  He sat down, started the engines, checked all the gauges and flaps, and ran through all of his checklists. He would do this all over again in the morning, but it didn’t hurt to be rigorous. He shut the engines down again, crawled out of the roof hatch, and checked the booster engines attached to the top of the craft. These five small turbojets allowed for short bursts of extreme acceleration—one of the first modifications they had made to the Loon.

  Everything seemed to be in working order, so he climbed over the apparatus and opened the roof cargo hold. It was small, about five feet long and ten feet wide, and rarely used. Inside was a petrified cat—a remnant from a job many years ago. Andy laughed at the memory. He verified that the interior door release was working, then grabbed the cat, climbed over the boosters, and descended into the passenger cabin. He closed all the window shades and made sure both doors—the one separating the cargo hold from the cabin and the one separating the cabin from the cockpit—were functioning properly. Finally, he grabbed a parachute from the cockpit and returned to the dock—dropping the cat off in the cargo hold along the way.

  He opened and unfolded the parachute. It had been a long time since it had been used, but after very careful inspection, he determined it was in excellent shape. He repacked it with meticulous care, set it aside, then began the unpleasant task of cleaning out the hold.

  Much of the clutter was just garbage, but Andy also found many long-forgotten treasures from previous adventures. These he took to the storage cabin. It was in desperate need of a cleaning as well, but that was not on the schedule for today. When he was satisfied there was nothing more he could do today, he picked up the parachute and headed up the hill to his cabin.

  The sun was low as he crested the hill. Tuck was sitting by the fire pit, tending to a slab of moose meat on a slowly turning rotisserie. It smelled wonderful, and he could hear the fat sizzling.

  “Did you find Bigfoot?” Andy asked as he sat in the chair next to his friend and placed the parachute in an adjacent seat.

  The short, thick, and heavily muscled Tuck continued his work with the meat, but he smiled broadly through his wild, dense, dark beard. “You know they call him Zajloot here, right?”

  “Yeah, I know,” Andy said with a smirk. “And he swims like an otter and lives in a beaver hut, or whatever. Did you find him?”

  “Just a matter of time, Skipper,” Tuck replied.

  Tuck wore his usual attire: gray tee shirt, brown canvas pants, leather belt, sheath knife, and leather boots. But his clothes were clean, and his bushy head and face were still a little damp, so he must have cleaned himself up after hauling in the moose meat. Besides, Andy couldn’t smell him, which was a dead giveaway.

  Tuck handed Andy a bottle of moonshine, then pulled the knife from his belt and sliced free a chunk of darkly seared meat. As Andy swallowed a mouthful of his friend’s self-brewed concoction—and decided he was even happier to see Tuck home—Tuck sectioned the meat into three pieces and offered the first one to Andy. Andy blew on it before popping it into his mouth.

  The meat was very hot, and the juices were bursting with each bite. It was tender but with a crisply seared edge. It was the most delicious thing Andy had eaten all day. Then he remembered: it was the only thing he had eaten all day.

  “You ever eat old goat?” asked Andy as he chewed.

  Tuck lowered the second piece of meat to Chief, who was resting beside him, and took the third piece for himself. “Sure,” he said. “We had goats when I was a kid. Occasionally we’d eat one.”

  Andy nodded. “What about calf?”

  “Beef calf? Nah, but a friend of mine accidentally killed a bison calf once. He gave me some of the meat.”

  “How was it?”

  “Not as good as this.” Tuck popped another small piece into his mouth. “Why do you ask?”

  Andy accepted another sliver of moose. “New client today. He was talking about…meat.”

  Tuck kept working the fire. “In the SUV?”

  “Yep.”

  “That was a nice ride,” said Tuck. “Does he have a good job for us?”

  “Well, it pays pretty good.”

  Andy’s tone made Tuck look up.

  “Military?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Do we need to leave?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Do I need to kill someone?”

  “I hope not.” Andy then filled Tuck in on the morning’s events—and the plan for the following day.

  ***

  The sun was almost gone when Piper arrived. “Hey, Tucker,” she said as she moved the parachute and sat next to Andy. “Is it time for chow?”

  “Just about, Sparky.” He handed her the bottle of moonshine. She took a swig and handed it to Andy, who followed suit.

  “Get Bigfoot?” she asked as she accepted a cut of perfectly broiled meat.

  Tuck just smiled and shook his head at the running joke.

  To Andy, she asked, “Did you tell him about our new client?”

  Andy nodded.

  “Good. I was working the numbers all afternoon. This payday could really put us on Easy Street. We could get by on two or three deliveries a week after this.”

  Neither of the men responded. They just continued to stare at the fire.

  “Did you guys hear me?” she said. “Andy, you could fly whenever you wanted! Go fishing whenever you wanted! Tuck, you could go Sasquatch hunting every week! Make gallons of moonshine, triple your garden size!” She looked at them hopefully.

  Finally, Andy turned to her. “That would be great, babe. Really, I would love to fly all over Lakeland, just you and me. Catch some big walleye, fry them up on the campfire, and sleep under the stars for a week.”

  “But…?”

  “But I want to be careful. I am excited about the job. Believe me, this could really be great for all of us. But it seems like something doesn’t quite line up. I just don’t know what it is.”

  “So you’re backing out?”

  “No, no, of course not. I think everything will be fine. I just want to take some precautions.”

  She eyed him suspiciously. “Like what?”

  Andy explained his plan, and they sat by the fire, ate moose, and drank moonshine long after the sun disappeared below the horizon.

  Chapter 4

  Andy awoke at dawn. His first thought was: Why did I drink so much moonshine? His second was to wonder about the weather.

  He stumbled from the bed, where Piper was still peacefully asleep, and peeked out of the window. The east was a beautiful mix of purple and orange, with not a
cloud in the sky. The air was still, and a layer of fog covered the lake.

  He went to the kitchen to start making coffee. Chief was lying in front of the door on the porch, which meant that Tuck was already in position. While the coffee was brewing, he cleaned up and dressed. He then poured two cups and returned to the bedroom just as Piper was beginning to stir.

  “Good morning, sunshine,” he said as he sat on the bed and held out a cup for her.

  She rolled over and mumbled, “Ugh, moonshine…”

  He smiled and tried again. “Rise and shine, sleepyhead! We’ve got a big day ahead of us!”

  She moved the pillow and covers enough for him to see her glare.

  The smile left his face. “This’ll help,” he said, offering the coffee again.

  She slowly sat up, accepted the cup, and took a small sip.

  “I’m going to go get the plane ready. Let’s plan on leaving in about one hour. Hopefully the fog will be gone by then.”

  She nodded. “What about the goons? Do they know when we’re leaving?”

  “They’re still playing soldier. They may already be down there waiting on us.”

  ***

  They weren’t, but they appeared silently in the fog on the dock before Andy could board the plane, so he didn’t get a chance to check on Tuck. He hoped his friend was aboard and ready as he turned to greet the two goons.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said cheerfully.

  They just stared at him blankly. They were dressed exactly alike, in matching black tactical gear, each with a shoulder holster under the left arm holding a small-caliber semiautomatic handgun, a larger handgun on the right hip, with a little gas canister attached to the barrel, and a rifle with a large sphere at the end of the barrel slung over the right shoulder. They were also wearing matching backpacks.

  Andy tried again. “We didn’t really get introduced. I’m Andy. What are your names?” He knew a handshake would be ignored, so he didn’t even make the attempt.