by D. J. Molles
“What do I want?” Jim said. “I want to not wake up in the middle of the night and find the man that is supposed to be in charge of our operation wandering around in the dark!” He looked around, like he feared his rising voice would garner him unwanted attention from things lurking in the woods. Then he went right back to LaRouche, pointing at him with the hand that gripped the rifle and, perhaps unintentionally, pointing the barrel at him as well. “I want you to grow up! It’s the middle of the night in enemy territory and you’re out here by yourself, drinking?”
LaRouche’s face twitched, just slightly. The creases on the sides of his nose flashing for a moment. An unfinished snarl. Then, calmly: “Preacher Man, you better get that fuckin’ rifle barrel out of my face before I beat you to death with it.”
Jim took a step back, incredulous. “Beat me with it? You’re going to beat me to death, LaRouche? Is that what this is about? Is this a personal issue between me and you because I’ve stepped on your toes one too many times? Hurt your pride a little bit? Didn’t make you feel like the big man?”
LaRouche stood up, felt the world sway uncomfortably, nearly tripped over himself. “Preacher…”
“Oh, here we go with the ‘Preacher this’ and ‘Preacher that’.” Jim shook his head. “You got a problem with me, then you got a problem with me. You don’t need to take shots at my faith.” He looked LaRouche up and down with disgust. “Look at yourself. Drunk. At this stage in the game?”
LaRouche held the bottle like a club. “I need you to shut the fuck up.”
“What were you planning on doing? Huh?” Jim threw his arms open. “Was it gonna help you forget, LaRouche? You one of those people that thinks they can drink away the fact that they’re responsible for the death of one of their friends?”
LaRouche’s eyes went wide. Jim’s words hitting their mark. He dropped the bottle and balled his fists. “I ain’t too drunk to beat your motherfuckin’ ass, Jim.”
Jim stepped forward. “Fine! I’m tired of you acting this way! You wanna hit me? Hit me!”
And LaRouche did. He grabbed the rifle and ripped it out of Jim’s grip, clumsily and drunkenly, but still too fast and too forceful for Jim to stop it from happening. Then LaRouche smashed his shin as hard as he could into the outside of Jim’s thigh, crunching the common peroneal nerve and making Jim’s knee’s buckle. Then, almost as an afterthought, he slammed the buttstock of the rifle into Jim’s nose, breaking the bone and knocking the man backward, glasses flying off.
LaRouche stood there over him as Jim squirmed around on his back, moaning and groaning and touching his bleeding nose. LaRouche swayed, feeling the fiery burn suddenly returning to his stomach. He burped and tasted whiskey. Still too pissed off to really care. Not about a bleeding ulcer, and certainly not about a bleeding nose that deserved everything that it got.
He yelled. Didn’t care about the volume. “Fuck you, Jim! Fuck you! I made a fucking bad decision! You think I don’t fucking know that? You think I’m drinking to make it all go away? Bullshit! I know this shit doesn’t go away! It’s on me forever! On me! Forever! That’s why I’m drinking, Jim!” He held a tight fist up. “So maybe this fucking vice in my guts will stop squeezing so I can sleep!”
Jim tried to struggle up, but LaRouche just shoved the other man back down to the ground with a boot to his chest. “People fucking die! People especially die in war!” He shoved a finger in the center of his own chest. “I know this, Jim. You don’t. You might think you know it because you watched some fucking war movies, but I fucking know it. Goddamn intimately. I made a decision. It turned out to be a bad one. Get the fuck over it and move on!”
Jim rolled away from LaRouche’s boot, and the movement was too quick for LaRouche to react. Instead he just stumbled back, still holding the rifle, while Jim lurched to his feet, still holding his nose, taking his hand away and looking at the blood. “Yeah. You made a decision. Against the advice of everyone around you.”
“It’s not a fuckin’ committee,” LaRouche growled. “You got a problem with doin’ what I say, you shoulda stayed back at Camp Ryder. I can’t drive you back there now, but I can put a fuckin’ bullet in your head, you fucking insubordinate piece of shit.”
“Insubordinate?” Jim actually laughed at him. “Insubordinate? For what? Because I don’t want to follow the orders of a man that is clearly not in a stable frame of mind? You’re not General Patton, LaRouche. You’re just some guy that Lee put his faith in, and clearly that was a big mistake.” Jim spat blood onto the ground and reached a hand out. “Gimme back my rifle.”
LaRouche ejected the magazine and tossed it and the rifle in separate directions. “Fuck your rifle.”
The objects clattered in the darkness.
For the span of about two seconds, the two men just stared across a distance of about ten feet at each other, LaRouche’s face without expression, a simple challenge, as though to say, what are you going to do about it? And the ex-priest lowering his head, his face hardening, growing dark.
Jim sprinted across the empty space between them and slammed into LaRouche before his hobbled reflexes could respond, pitching both of them to the ground. LaRouche rolled, trying to get off his back and turn Jim over, but the sheer force of the attack was overwhelming. Jim grunted and panted and gasped like a wild animal in a death match, grabbing LaRouche by the collar and slamming his face with elbows so that stars spun in the corners of his vision, then rearing back and simply hammering at him with balled fists. LaRouche tried to ward them off, tried to block them, but he would have been more successful if he’d been sober. The blows slipped through his defensive postures and hit his face, his head, repeatedly. And it seemed like it was nonstop, like Jim was working through some raw explosion that had been building up like a volcanic blast over the course of the last few months. Everything that he had been through simply came out of him in a single, headlong rush of violence, and it all pummeled straight into LaRouche.
LaRouche tried to remember his training from the guard. Very simple hand-to-hand combat techniques taught to him what seemed like a lifetime ago.
Buck the hips. Trap the arm. Roll.
He thrust his hips up, causing Jim to sprawl and catch himself with his hands planted in the ground. In the same movement, LaRouche snaked his right arm up and around Jim’s left arm, pinning it close into his body. Then he put a hand on Jim’s shoulder and rolled with all the force he could muster. Jim tumbled over with a grunt and suddenly LaRouche found himself on top.
There was a scrabbling of hands, and LaRouche wasn’t quite sure what was happening. He only knew that whatever Jim attempted to do, he was opposed. And it seemed that Jim was trying to reach for something, though LaRouche couldn’t tell what it was. They fought back and forth for control of their arms, but Jim managed to slip one out and his hand reached through the grass, looking for something.
A rock. A rock to hit me with.
He’s gonna try to brain me with a rock.
And in that moment, it became very real in LaRouche’s mind. He pictured Father Jim on the ground below him, grabbing a loose stone, one with a sharp edge, but still enough heft behind it to do some damage. And then swinging it—panicked, not thinking about the consequences of his actions—just swinging it with everything he had and catching LaRouche right in the temple, right where the bone is thin, and crushing his skull, immediately knocking him unconscious, his brain jarring around violently inside its shell of bone. Bleeding. Oozing out of his ears. Swelling up and crushing his brain stem, killing him just as surely as a bullet would.
Son of a bitch.
He’s trying to kill me.
It was part panic, part cold dread, part remorse, part anger. Everything swirling around and causing him to hesitate, which only made his panic worse, made it overcome him as he watched Jim’s hand reaching through the tall grass around him and he wasn’t able to think about anything else but that hand, looking for that rock, trying to brain him, trying to kill him.
To kill him.
LaRouche ripped backwards and then with his left hand posted on Jim’s chest, he drew his Beretta M9 with his right hand, put it point-blank onto Jim’s cheek, and then pulled the trigger. The blast of it was jarring. The gore spilled out onto the ground. Sudden and absolute stillness followed, save for the peripheral twitching of Jim’s fingers through the grass.
Oh my God…
Oh my God I killed him.
This can’t be happening.
This isn’t real.
“Jim!” LaRouche cried out, his voice suddenly choked as he struggled to his feet. “Fuck you, Jim! Wake the fuck up! I didn’t even…I didn’t…Oh my God…Oh my God!”
The world spun around him madly. An angry carousel. A bad trip. Just blurs of colors, if sudden and earth-shattering regret had a color. There was no possible way that that had just happened. There was no way that it had come to that. No way that Jim had tried to kill him—dear God help me—and there was no way he had just put a bullet through Jim’s head.
It was Jim.
Father Jim.
LaRouche reached down, dropping the pistol and grabbing Jim with both hands. He shook the body, though he knew that it would make no difference. “Jim! Fucking stop! You motherfucker! Fucking stop! That’s enough! That’s fucking enough! Goddamn it! You never fucking listen! You could never fucking listen to any goddamned thing I say! What the fuck is wrong with you?”
He stood up, grabbed his pistol off the ground, turned in random circles, his free hand gripping his forehead like he was trying to keep some fragile structure from falling apart. He couldn’t help himself, he kept looking at the body lying on the ground, hoping that it would spring back up, do something, even argue with him—please, just do anything but lay there. So permanent.
He bent over without warning and vomited. Tasted the blood from his ulcer.
How am I going to explain this? I can’t. I can’t explain this. I can’t lie about this. I just don’t have it in me and they’re gonna know. They’re gonna know that I killed him. Wilson and Dorian and all the rest of them…I won’t be able to trick them. They’ll know that I killed Father Jim. Fucking killed him. Goddamn it, I fucking killed him!
And he wasn’t sure whether or not he had imagined it or whether it was real, but he thought he heard movement coming from over the hill, from the direction of the convoy.
The gunshot. They must have heard the gunshot.
He wanted to try to explain, wanted to try to convince them all why he had killed Father Jim. He wanted to try to make them see it from his perspective, but each time he tried to think about what he was going to say, it tasted fake and unbelievable. All the logic, all the reason that was left in him after the whiskey had washed it all away, it bled out of him with the rising panic and all he could think was that he had to get away from the body. He had to get away. He had to get away as quickly as he could.
Holding his pistol in his hand, he ran.
***
Wilson startled awake. Someone was knocking on the window, repeatedly, rapidly. He looked around, confused after being ripped from the deepest point of sleep. It was still completely dark outside, and as he looked around he couldn’t see LaRouche or Father Jim in the truck with him, and he felt their absence like a swelling fear.
Knocking.
He turned to the window and was startled at the sight of Dorian standing there. He fumbled with the knob, then dropped the window. He took a breath to ask Dorian what the hell was going on and why in God’s name he was tapping on his window in the middle of the night when it wasn’t even his turn to be on watch. But Dorian began speaking before Wilson had a chance.
“There’s something wrong,” Dorian pointed out towards a field adjacent to them. “Just heard a gunshot. LaRouche walked out there by himself like, over an hour ago. And then I think Father Jim went after him. And I just heard yelling, and then a shot.”
“Shit.” Wilson shoved the door open, began pulling on his gear. “This isn’t good.”
He just kept thinking, Father Jim and LaRouche…alone.
“Should I wake up the others?” Dorian asked.
Wilson slung into his rifle, checked the chamber. “Yes. Get everybody on standby. But just you and me and one other person go out, you got that?”
Dorian nodded, then ran down the convoy, smacking windows with the palm of his hand and yelling, “Everyone up! Grab your gear and standby!” At the rear of the convoy, he pointed to another man as he climbed sleepily out of his vehicle and motioned for him to come with. Wilson knew the man only as Tim, and the sum of his knowledge about the man was that he hung out with Dorian a lot. They jogged back to Wilson, rifles in hand.
Wilson jerked his head towards the field, and took off at a steady double-time, Dorian and Tim behind him. As he moved, he couldn’t stop his mind from trying to explain what Dorian had told him. And there wasn’t a feasible explanation that wasn’t bad. There was not a good reason why there would only be one gunshot, which was the thing that worried him the most. A flurry of gunshots at least would have meant a battle. But just a single gunshot…
He reached the top of a small rise and looked down the slope of the other side. It was an expanse of old, neglected cropland, and then forest. And beyond the forest would be the river. But Wilson saw the scene as clear as if it had been illuminated by a spotlight: the matted grass around a small boulder. The slump of a form, lying on the ground.
“Shit.” He broke into a run. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
He hesitated as he drew close, perhaps out of caution, or perhaps because he just didn’t want to see what he knew was lying there. He didn’t want it to be true, but the facts jittered around in his chest and made him sick.
He stopped a few feet from the body. He grabbed his face, then raked his fingers back to his neck. He didn’t bother to bend down and check for a pulse. He could see the brain matter coming out of the top of Jim’s head, a thick tube of it curling on itself like meat forced through a grinder.
“Is that Father Jim?” Dorian cried, his voice breaking.
Tim gaped. “What happened?”
Wilson couldn’t stop a sudden sob, an abrupt burst of emotion. He threw his head back and tried to strangle it off through bared teeth, but couldn’t stop. He knew what had happened. It didn’t take a fucking detective to figure it out. And even through the blur of his tears he could see the path through the field—matted grass where someone had just run through it. It led away from the scene, and further away from the convoy. Towards the forest. Towards the river.
Wilson began to pace. Trying to catch his breath.
Behind him, Dorian and Tim remained silent.
His eyes kept going to that little trail through the grass. It had to have been LaRouche. He went through the grass. He ran from the scene. And then Wilson thought, should I go after him? What if something else had happened? What if they’d been attacked and someone had shot Jim and taken LaRouche hostage?
One shot. He shook his head furiously. One fucking shot.
If they’d been attacked, there would have been more than one shot.
He stood still for a moment, stretched his chest out and sucked down a deep enough breath to break through the dread and the panic and settle him enough so he could speak. But he could feel the weakness in his voice. Hated himself for it. So he blew that breath out, and tried another. Finally he felt strong enough to turn to Dorian and Tim.
“Grab Jim and take him back to the convoy.” He stared at them, wondering what to say next. There would be rampant speculations. The rumor mill in small groups is viciously effective. If he didn’t give them an explanation for all of this, they would imagine one up. But he couldn’t tell them the truth. Partially because it was a heady accusation to make on what amounted to little more than a gut hunch. And partially because he knew it would destroy them. It would destroy the morale. There were those that felt strongly for Father Jim, and others felt strongly for
LaRouche. He wasn’t going to turn them against each other.
He turned away from Dorian and Tim because he struggled to lie to their faces. Maybe not too much of a lie: “I think Sarge is in trouble.”
CHAPTER 33: ABDUCTED
Somehow, sleep came to Angela, but in a disquieted form. It hovered over her and she wanted it to cover her, but couldn’t control her mind from lashing out, throwing it off of her what felt like every ten minutes or so. She kept waking up, hoping desperately that it would be dawn. She kept thinking about what she had to do, as soon as the light showed itself. She kept thinking about how she was going to gather the nine people that had agreed to take a stand with her—Marie, Jenny, Katie, the Mathesons, the Scharfs, and the Crowleys. She had to figure out a place for them to meet and quickly coordinate with whatever Lee had planned for the following night.
And then her mind would be off and running, trying to think of how on earth Lee had survived, trying to figure out what he had survived, what he had been through the last few days. Was he just with Old Man Hughes’ group the entire time? How had he dealt with the Eddie Ramirez situation?
The entire time, she held the folded piece of paper in her hands, clutched there and growing damp with the sweat from her hands. The message that it held, written by Lee, who was so unbelievably close and alive, but she hadn’t even seen him yet.
Tomorrow night.
Midnight.
All of this went on behind her flickering eyelids while she half-slept. The sleep was purely an action of physical exhaustion while her mind raced on, tapping its foot and waiting for her depleted body to catch up. The emotions that she felt were muted by the sleep, but they were there nonetheless, like things bumping on the underside of a rickety old boat. There was fear—plenty of fear. But there was also a sort of breathlessness that came when something you wanted so badly was within reach, and yet so vulnerable that it might disappear if you looked away for one second.