by Brian Hart
Dedication
For my family
Tof
Kerri and Jürgen
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
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[-2]
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Endorsements
Also by Brian Hart
Copyright
About the Publisher
[-1]
The dog works the wind, out and back, both sides of the road. When it stops ranging to mark a stump, the two men standing by take it as an all clear and hoist their heavy packs from the tailgate and sling their rifles. The red moon is an omen. They leave the truck partially hidden among the skid roads and slash piles at the edge of the clear-cut and follow the broken pavement uphill.
Three mile-markers come and go, and they leave the road and scramble through the rocks and past a wrecked school bus fifty yards down to a dry riverbed. In the shadow of the canyon they switch on their red LED headlamps. Deer tracks are stamped into the red mud but the ground is hard enough now to resist even a scuff and sounds almost hollow beneath their Vibrams. The dog keeps its head down and works its nose upstream.
They climb over and under the fallen trees and traverse a rock field. Weapons are passed hand to hand, packs removed, packs replaced. No fucking way is the initial response to the forty-foot-tall concrete ramp of the spillway, but flat-footed and careful, their boots hold. The dog has more trouble than they do and the younger man has to pull him along by the scruff of his neck. At the top, between the wall of the dam and the spillway, there’s a shelf, eight feet wide, maybe sixty long, the edges lost in shadow.
The older man shrugs off his oversized camouflage backpack and sets it gently on the ground. He uses a black bandana to wipe the sweat from his face and the back of his neck. The other man’s pack is smaller with much less hardware and weight, but with the strange acoustics of the concrete it’s noisy and something rattles as he sets it down and earns a look from the older man.
“Yeah, I know,” he says, and fishes out a small plastic bowl and squirts water into it from his CamelBak for the dog. Of the four reinforced steel floodgates, only one is open. The steel is twisted and one corner is dog-eared and the thick timbers that held it in place are splintered. While the dog drinks the two men squat down and peer beneath the damaged gate. The red moon blackens the deep cracks and depressions in the lakebed. The older man removes a monocular from his tactical vest and puts it to his eye.
“From here to the main house,” he says. Ahab on the glass. “They’ll be watching the road. And it looks like the fence and the gate have been repaired, so they’ll feel safe. At this point I don’t know what they’ll have up and running, probably nothing. We used to have wireless cameras, a couple of drones flying grids, motion sensors all around the lake.”
“So we’ll shoot from here? How far is that?”
“We’ll take position there.” He lowers his scope and points to a pile of boulders in a slight depression fifty yards from shore. If there were water, that’s where the fish would be. “I make it three, maybe three-fifty, to the house but they’ll come closer.”
“If they come out.”
“They’ll come out.”
From inside his gun bag the older man removes four duct-taped brick-sized packages of Semtex and shifts things around in his vest until he can fit them into one of the larger pouches. He has two sidearms, drop leg and pancake, the former was his wife’s. They watch the dog drink and their sweat begins to dry.
The younger man removes the bikini cover from his scope and checks the bolt, the safety. “Stay,” he whispers to his dog. “You’re going to stay.” He could be deer hunting, putting the sneak on some muleys.
“Fudd gun with Fudd optics,” the older man says, and removes one of the three rifles from his bag and slips it from its sock. “I can link to my phone,” he says, tapping the stubby scope mounted on the rail. “I need you on my six.”
“With the jargon.”
“I’d feel better though, knowing.” The first sign of fear lights his eyes.
“Fine.”
The older man lifts his pack like a suitcase from the carousel and goes through the broken mouth of the spillway.
“Stay,” the younger man repeats to the dog. “You stay.” He sucks a mouthful of water from his CamelBak and lifts his pack by the loop and, careful of his rifle barrel, ducks low through the gate and easy, easy climbs down from the concrete ledge and onto the bed of the dry reservoir. Above him the moon is the tarnished head of a carriage bolt.
They nestle into the rocks. The older man pulls on a stocking hat, then takes the Bushmaster and switches on the scope. With his phone in his lap he syncs the two, passes the younger man the phone. He uses the rifle to scan the lakebed and the house and compound beyond, shakes his head and passes the weapon over in exchange for the phone.
“This is how you switch modes.”
“OK.”
“Show me.”
“I got it.”
“Doesn’t look that way,” the older man says. “Are you with me right now? I need you here, nowhere else.”
“Death is my copilot and we’re cruising for death.”
“I’d rather you were crying again than talking that nonsense. You need to get your head right. We’re doing this.” He rises to his feet and adjusts his vest and his weapon, pats down his pockets. “You need to stop.”
“I’m good.”
The older man grunts his approval, nods his head. “I’ll see you shortly.”
He follows the dry channel from the boulders and stirs up a cloud of dust. From there he’s on flat ground, one step after the other, then he’s crawling up the crumbling bank to the shore. The ancient barbed wire is parted and he strolls upright and leisurely toward the main house, no available cover, a field of stumps. He’s swallowed by the shadow of the ridge and the younger man puts the scope to his eye. At the chain-link security fence the Technicolor thermal blob in the scope cuts the wire and slips through. Unblinking, sweating, the younger man lowers the scope and waits for the crack of rifle fire because after that he’ll be alone. He can’t watch. He can’t help but think of her.
It’s the dog that’s nudging him. He lifts his head and pets the dog and scans the lakebed with the scope. He searches the road and the darkened house and outbuildings and is temporarily blinded by the runway lights coming on, but there are still no lights in the house or on the road. No warm bodies. He switches modes on the scope so he can see the runway. Nothing moves. The dog lifts its nose to the wind.
The older man surprises him when he returns by way of the floodgate. “I doubled back and checked the road. We’re good. Motion sensor tripped the lights on the runway, but everything else is down. Place is a shit show. No s
ecurity. Beer cans, bonfire down to ashes. Drunk bastards.” He extracts two cans of warm beer from his vest, passes one over. “Let’s get settled in before you open that.”
They spread out among the boulders and set their lanes and rests for their rifles. The older man has his big bag open and extra magazines stacked in groups by caliber. He puts his focus to the .50 but he has his M4 and a SOCOM 16 ready to go if they need to move. The other man only has his Remington 700 and an extra magazine, two tattered boxes of shells. They open their beers, cheers, and drink. The runway lights blink off.
“I have whiskey,” the older man says in a whisper. “In the bag.”
The younger man taps the flask in his breast pocket. “Walmart’s finest.” The dog curls up beside him and he rests his hand on the dog’s neck and pulls on his fur.
They each drink what they have and don’t share.
“Story of our lives,” the younger man says. “Fuck you, get your own.”
“I brought you a beer.”
“I appreciate that.”
“I was an engineer,” the older man says.
“OK.”
“You asked me once. I was never a soldier.”
The younger man nods and takes a deep drink of his beer, stuffs the burp in the name of stealth and nearly vomits. “I was bitching about you one time,” he says. “And she said to me, she said you were an autodidact. I was sure it was an insult.”
“It’s not.”
“I know. I looked it up. She said me and you, the two of us, were birds of a feather.” He finishes his beer and sets the can down gently on a flat rock. “I didn’t like that.”
“I built the infrastructure of war.” The engineer points at the sky, a blinking light. “The last project I was on was a DOD satellite design team.”
“That one?”
“No. I don’t know. How would I know that?”
“Because you’re a satellite engineer. Who else would know?”
The engineer finishes his beer and sets the can down. “My whole life has been preparing me for this moment. I’ve trained for this. I understand this world.”
“You could be strapped in an electric chair saying the same thing.”
The engineer lowers his head. He’s an old man. “Maybe.”
“The world’s most dangerous nerd.”
The engineer shelters the screen with his hand and turns on his phone, switches screens, shows it to the man beside him. “You want to or me?” It’s a plain red button in a black screen.
“You do it.”
The engineer presses the button. “Listen,” he says. “Listen to me.”
“I am. I’m listening.”
“In forty-something seconds that place is going blammo and whoever comes out, we’re gonna kill them. OK? I need you all in now. This is it.”
“OK. Shit.”
“I’m saying in forty-something—”
“Gotta be thirty by now.”
“I’m saying good to know you and what are you doing?”
“Hey, man.”
“I’m saying it’s been a privilege. You’re a good guy. A good family man. I judged you wrong when we first met. I thought you were someone you weren’t. Maybe I thought I was someone else too.”
“Jesus, Chuck. You’re my hero. I mean it.”
“Can you stop it with that? For once.”
“I’m not ready, man.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s happening. It’s happening. Hold on to that dog so it doesn’t run. Here we go.”
[0]
R<25
CA 96118
The key, turned twice more, gave no response, no click or rattle, just a not-working mechanical nothing. One minute Roy was singing along with some ancient mixtape Toots and the Maytals—I want you to know that I am the man who fights for the right, not for the wrong—and the next, not even the murky lights of the idiot gauges would come on. The sudden quiet was unsettling. Bam bam. Roy glanced at Karen still sleeping in the passenger seat and touched the dash, a gesture, a war movie corpsman pulling his comrade’s eyelids closed.
He’d exited I-5 fifty miles or so south of the Oregon-California border and hit the backroads hoping to see an ice waterfall his pal Pablo had mentioned once while they were sessioning the vert ramp in Corruptible Pete’s quonset hut. Highway numbers scribbled on a scrap of beer box long since lost. Squinting at road signs through the storm, mouthing the words, places real and imagined: Lassen, Portola, the Weddell Sea, Graeagle, Scott Base. This is what you get listening to somebody who does andrechts with no pads, not even a lid. The arterial gulp of isolation, repeated, and then repeated.
So here they were: man and woman—Roy and Karen—destituters, plain-view hiders, no-place-is-homers, positionless, bearingless, kind of young, and truly restless. They’d tried to cross from one island of safety to the next and they’d gotten lost in the archipelago.
Karen opened her eyes and looked around, squinting. “What’re you doing?” she said with a rasp, a light, not-quite-ex-smoker’s hack. “What’s the matter?”
“Carl just quit.”
“What?”
“He just died. I don’t know. Does your phone work? I got nothing.”
She dug around in her bag until she found it. “Nothing. Where are we?”
“An hour since I turned off the freeway. If we go back. If we go forward, I don’t know. We haven’t passed anybody forever. I think we’re fucked.”
“Is fucked a place?”
“Watch yourself.”
Roy was smiling as he climbed into the back of the van and wrestled his greasy, punk-patched jean jacket, his warmest coat, from the bottom of his duffel bag and pulled it on over his hoodie. He had no gloves and no hat, besides one of the mesh-back, trucker variety. His skateboard shit had a corner to itself: a five-stack of extra decks, three sets of shrink-wrapped wheels, extra trucks, a six-foot roll of grip tape, an old-timey orange tacklebox filled with kingpins, bushings, bearings, and mounting hardware. Skate mags, vids, stickers, and loose photographs in a Bacardi box. Another tacklebox grease-penned with red Xs that held bandages, tape, generic ibuprofen, Neosporin, vitamin C, and assorted herbal supplement bottles that had been refilled with Vicodin and Valium, Percocets and lorazepams.
The center of the van was heaped with unzipped sleeping bags, blankets and pillows, dirty clothes. There was a three-pack of condoms and a couple of empty wrappers by the wheel well. Not long ago, six months back, there’d been an abortion, Karen’s second. Apparently the first had been when Karen was still in high school. She wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t tell Roy who the father was, said it didn’t matter. When he pushed back, Karen assured him it wasn’t anything creepy, she wasn’t raped or anything like that.
“What’s the big deal?” Roy had said, looking at the double lines on the pregnancy test. “Go take a couple of pills and boom, finito.”
“That’s not the way it is though,” Karen said. “When you’re an adult, there are implications.”
“A butterfly fluttering its wings in China can make a tornado in Des Moines? Ripples in a pond? I say fuck all that interconnectedness bullshit.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Karen said. “All the time you act like you’re some kind of hedonist, but you’re just being a prick.”
“I’m more of a nihilist than a hedonist.”
“Nihilism is training wheels for assholes.”
“OK, then I’m neither. I’m just, you know, whatever, doing what I can. Trying to make you not flip out.”
“And the training wheels come off! You’re a big boy now.”
But they still went to the clinic and got an ultrasound and watched the required-by-law video and Karen took the pills. In the car, after they’d pulled out of the shameful back lot, there were tears. The poison or hormone, whatever it was, ran its course and Karen was in pain and there was bleeding and cramping, but Roy could tell it was the emotional side that was getting her down. Not even the
grande-sized ibuprofen would help with that. He tried to be there and play nurse and rent her movies, pick up takeout, but as usual he fucked it up, rented movies he wanted to see, ordered food he liked. And after a few days of tenderness, he’d started thinking, you need to move on, we need to move on, and returned to his baseline of hard drinking and skating.
It was the human capacity of it all that bothered him, the Christian Science baggage carousel that spun around and offered hard numbers and data, or a living, breathing child. Having a baby didn’t need to be a kill-or-be-killed situation. Maybe he’d do things differently now. Maybe they’d keep the kid. Whenever you’re ready, he should’ve said, I’m here. I put you in this place. I’ll stay here until you’re ready to go. He’d get it right next time, or at least more right.
He gave Karen a kiss on the top of her head while she dug through her bag, then opened the door and hopped outside to pop the tiny worthless hood instead of battling with the knuckle-busting latches on the doghouse, because that was a whole other hole to go down. But he’d forgotten to pull the release for the hood, so, back in, driver’s door open, reaching for the lever.
“Are we out of gas?” Somehow Karen had managed to put on lipstick in the three to five seconds that he was outside. He smelled the thick, animal-tested, tallow-vat smell before he noticed the waxy red sheen on her lips.
“We aren’t out of gas.” He upshot and wiggled a couple of stiff fingers, Brit bird, in the general area of her mouth. “I like that color. You look great.”
“We’ve been on the road. I feel skeezy. Would you rather I look like shit?” She puckered her lips and gave him a few air smooches.
“No, I’m serious. It’s a good color.” He grinned and with effort thought he kept his malice from rising to a visible level. “Me and all the bigfoots and grizzly bears are impressed and super turned-on. Rock-hard yetis everywhere.” Door shut, into the wind. He didn’t know what he wanted from her. He wasn’t mad, not at her, but the unwelcome, woman-hating voice of his stepfather, Steve, entered his mind anyway—
Range is cold.
“Like the off-ramp bums,” Steve had said. They were at the Pala rez range, wasting ammo, talking groups and trigger pull, more or less ignoring their mutual distaste for each other. Steve ejected the empty magazine and opened the bolt and set his rifle on the bench. He held up a finger as in wait, then removed his ear protection and his amber shooting glasses. “Will not work for food if my tits can get it for free. Will bitch endlessly for no good reason. Will not stand by my man if I see any chance for chiseling. Will grind my man to dust. Anything helps.”