The Heart of War: Book Seven of the What's Left of My World Series

by C. A. Rudolph

  After visiting with Lee and paying her respects the previous day, Lauren had walked back to the Perrys’ barefoot, having forsaken her shoes in the woods. She hadn’t bothered returning for them, their value in that time having become insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The cuts and scrapes inflicted on her soles by sharp objects on which she’d strode had felt good in a way. Jabs of jagged gravel, pricks of thistles and stabs of shredded twigs had brought with them a minute agony that had dampened so well the war of anguish lopping away at her soul. It had become clear to her then why cutters inflicted self-harm, slicing at their skin with knives, scissors and the like. The external pain and the body’s subsequent reaction provided pause, a temporary reprieve from internal suffering. Self-injury wasn’t meted out to numb one’s feelings or for one to feel numb, it was done to feel alive.

  Lauren could not remember ever having felt worse than she had on that day. She’d spent a good while studying the damage, the scorched earth, the absolute annihilation that supplanted what had once been a home, a thriving business, and three human lives. She’d noticed the Honda four-wheeler she had deserted there in days prior, and had stared at it for a long while, wondering why it hadn’t yet been retrieved by anyone. The family had two others just like it; the whereabouts of the third evidently hadn’t been a main concern. But the longer she’d considered it, the more it had called to her, and a blueprint for what she would do next came to fruition.

  Lauren had taken the quad on something of a joyride, having driven it at perilous speeds all the way north to the abandoned town of Wardensville, with no regard for the valley’s borders or her own safety. The speed-driven winds had whipped through her hair and batted around the dress she’d been wearing like the gale forces of a churning tempest. The experience was galvanizing and cathartic, and she’d embraced it eagerly after such a brutal series of days. At the road’s end, she had reversed direction and returned to the cabin, having decided then to pack a bag and take her leave for a while, though not before making a few stops to further supplement her loadout.

  An integrally suppressed carbine she’d appropriated on one of those stops poised in her lap, Lauren sat cross-legged atop the resplendent sandstone outcropping making up Big Schloss. She looked intently below into the rolling valleys of trees, recalling what she had done successive to that, smirking at the absurdity of it all. Absurd as it might’ve been, it had unmistakably been the freest she had ever felt in her life, both before and after the day commemorating the collapse of society.

  With her backpack and a pair of tactically acquired gear duffels secured to the Rancher’s rear rack, she had driven south on Trout Run Road, up the mountain to Wolf Gap, where the D9T bulldozer had been returned to act as a formidable roadblock. There, she’d spent some time searching for an off-road detour and eventually had crossed over to the Virginia side of the mountain, while recalling a hike to a remote waterfall on which her father had taken her sometime in her early teens.

  Retracing the route from memory, Lauren had navigated to and along forest road 252 to the trailhead after having bypassed several defunct forest service tube gates. She’d concealed the Rancher in a thick patch of blackberry, donned her pack, and followed the trail’s sheerness to an unmarked side trail perceptible only by a duo of cairns, one on either side. The side trail jutted left and up, flattened for a stint, and led downward into a deep, narrow gully. After a steep descent, it opened into a dark, humid cove, green with ferns, the air hued white by rising mist, enclosed on all sides but one by an altar-like formation of rock. Roots of moss-covered shrubs and evergreens ran along and above sizable pillars of limestone and granite. The expanse was like a lost city, unspoiled by man, so exceptional and enriched in natural splendor that Lauren couldn’t find words to describe it.

  She remembered the cold, the utter frigidness entombed within. The microclimate’s chill clung to the air, assailing anyone daring to trespass. The only sounds she recalled were the incredibly harsh smacks of water crashing onto a pile of fractured stones at the base of the falls, some waterworn, others jagged and razor sharp.

  Lauren had scaled her way down into the detached obscurity of the cove and had hung her pack from a low-hanging branch of a lone pine jutting from a boulder. And while shedding a few tears, she had undressed until every delicate inch of her skin was bared. Revealing herself to nature and all its elements, tingling all over in bizarre, immodest distress, she’d gone to the waterfall as the humidity rose and the air temperature plummeted from cold to perceptibly frigid.

  There, Lauren trembled, her body convulsing furiously in reaction to the cold, but she hadn’t felt any shame. The weight of icy water surging downward from sixty feet above looked powerful enough to crush her, but she hadn’t turned back. It was nature being nature in the rawest of states. Water embraced by earth, squeezed to the surface by pressure, becoming one with a wandering stream that plummeted to whatever lie below, because gravity could not be defied.

  Its seductive influence calling to her, Lauren had gone to stand beneath the cascading water, feeling instantly the tremendous weight of earth’s pull on it. Her body’s reaction to the cold was all-pervading; it was both pleasurable and painful, delightful and heartbreaking. And it had gripped her with a vigor so fierce that she nearly hadn’t been able to countermand its invitation.

  Lauren knew the signs and stages of hypothermia. She knew how it began and how it ended, but had never experienced it firsthand until then. Still, she’d stood there and showered beneath the arctic-laced deluge until she couldn’t feel her toes and could barely catch her breath. Collapsing into a writhing ball atop herself, she’d scrambled away on numb hands and wobbling knees, her motor skills radically diminished. Just as her body had begun teeming with an abnormal internal warmth, she’d found her pack and fought in desperation to unstow a fire kit and a mylar blanket with which she’d enveloped herself. She couldn’t recall the precise sequence of events that followed but remembered well the sensation of her fire’s lifesaving heat breathing on her skin.

  Had doing this been absurd? Looking back, it undoubtedly had been. Lauren had taken herself to the brink of bitter death in the remotest of locations miles away from help, having turned a blind eye to every conceivable risk. But she felt different now, on the mend, far improved from what she had been. She was formidable once again, as if by some means she’d become one with the cataract and had emerged from it, revived anew. Doing this had cleaned the slate, allowed her to break herself down to the crux, to the raw essence of who she was at the core. Lauren had needed to chip away all the frivolous nonsense from her being to become one with herself again, to relocate her inner strength, to be unafraid and unconquerable, something that could not be stopped, akin to a force of nature.

  Her father had taught her about the outdoors, how to survive in less than ideal environments, and the basics of firearms and self-defense. Dave Graham, Woo Tang, Sanchez and the unit had instructed her to be deadly, resilient, to improvise, adapt and act deliberately, and commit to violence of action. Their voices had spoken subliminally to her when needed or called upon, but this time, it wasn’t her father or her armed forces tutors who were doing so.

  “Positive attitude coupled with a superior state of mind makes all the difference…once you’ve made up your mind that nothing can stop you, nothing will.”

  It was Jade’s counsel, sounding off perceptually in paraphrase, almost as if on cue. The woman had become a friend of sorts, even though she remained nothing short of an enigma, but that hadn’t hindered her stirring verse from circulating all through Lauren’s psyche, functioning as the lifeblood fuel she so demanded right now.

  Contemplating her journey, Lauren admitted to herself she didn’t know where to begin. As she scoured the environment below for visual indications and anything that might help her find direction, she recapped the latest events and their aftermaths together with the most recent, an act so heinous it had sent her over the edge.

  This ha
d begun with children being abducted while playing innocuously in their own backyards. But by what means? The roadways in and out of the valley were blocked and guarded, eliminating the threat of vehicular travel, but it was undeniably impossible to secure all the pathways and trails. Lauren knew practically all of them. Many led from trailheads off Trout Run Road into the higher elevations of national forest and surrounding wilderness. Most were more than footpaths, though; they were multiuse trails, designed for equestrian and even all-terrain vehicle use. Wrongdoers could have feasibly entered the valley on any one of these, executed their mission, and departed on foot without a trace.

  Agents who performed these categories of tasks were without a doubt disciplined, in shape, and well trained. Far from amateurs, they were experts in their trade, and that meant direct confrontation wasn’t going to work. If Lauren were to beat them, she would need to take them out without being seen or heard, much in the same fashion as they had swooped into the valley to perform their exploits.

  They had been a stone’s throw away then, but where were they now? The FEMA camp itself was a mere fifteen miles away from her back-door stoop, but the operations in which they’d been engaging had brought their people much closer in. Had they returned to the safety of their headquarters? Or were they still here, possibly encamped somewhere nearby…making ready to perpetrate yet another iniquity while gloating over their accomplishments?

  Lauren placed both palms to the sandstone and deliberated. For reasons she couldn’t discern, she knew they weren’t far away. It was an intuition, a feeling of a tactless, intruding presence that didn’t belong. She’d felt a similar presence when she and Grace had come here on an innocent hike on Thanksgiving Day only to have so much go awry. Just as she had known then who had been to blame, Lauren knew who was culpable now; the federal elements that had been seeking so hard to wipe her commune out were back, up to their old tricks again.

  Searching for these men in the forest was parallel to rummaging for a lost pine needle in a field of prairie grass. The Harris NVD binoculars Lauren had adopted would help. They magnified diminished light in the darkness well enough on their own short of an infrared illuminator, and she could run them continuously without being detected. The FLIR infrared monocular was the true prize, though. It detected and displayed heat signatures belonging to anything, natural or artificial—human, beast and especially vehicles propelled by internal combustion. In the world she knew now, any heat sig spotted in the forest would serve as evidence. The only drawback was that Lauren didn’t know their effective range.

  She went through the motions with the M4. It wasn’t hers, and if her intent was to employ it as such, she needed to know its ins and outs; there could be no surprises. The weapon was the one to which Jade had referred as her carbine’s ‘fraternal twin’, a Heckler and Koch HK416, a nonstandard M4 variant with which she had yet to develop experience. It had a shortened barrel, a suppressor, and a universal set of controls. Nothing appeared out of place or was located anywhere her muscle memory wouldn’t be able to find.

  A light drizzle began falling from an increasingly overcast sky, and Lauren decided it best to move out. She scaled down from her vantage point and hiked the spur trail back to where she’d camouflaged her ATV and gear beneath a blanket of brush. She went about readying it for departure, stopping midway when a thought hit her. If her hunch was right, taking the quad anywhere beyond this point would be a mistake. The engine and exhaust would no doubt draw unwanted attention. And that meant the only choice was to go on foot.

  After some reassessment, Lauren shouldered her load and started north. Within a few hours, she reached the intersection with the Tuscarora Trail, where the footpath widened considerably. She harkened back to the last time she’d been here, headed in the opposite direction, towing a sprained ankle, accompanied by a recently made acquaintance. The thought of Christian being caught up in this made her heart sink even further into the hole she had dug for herself and into which she was now spelunking headfirst.

  Lauren didn’t want to waste any more time concentrating on matters she couldn’t control, but the reverie couldn’t be overcome. While fighting against her musings, she paid close attention to her foot placement as the ragged laurel branches encroached on her ankles. She couldn’t leave clues behind that could be used to track her. A half mile farther in, however, she’d begun noticing a pattern, that something of the same had already been done, though not by her, by something or someone else.

  Nearing the intersection of Little Stoney Creek Trail, she continued at a snail’s pace, rifle at low ready, while inspecting each instance of damage, infinitesimal or the converse. Some branches were unnaturally twisted while others were snapped or pulled into the path in adverse patterns. Some shoots clung by threads; some lay in the grass, having been shorn completely. Conceivably, a deer could’ve done this, a clumsy bear or even a grouse. But would an animal have left a pattern in such a way?

  Lauren went low and reflected over the footpath, recalling Sugar Knob Cabin was just around the corner. She thought of Christian again and the topics they had spoken of during their first forty-eight hours together. While ascending a mountain trail to escape DHS search dogs and their handlers, he had proven himself skillful and knowledgeable regarding escape and evasion. Could he have done this? Had he been mindful enough to leave a bread trail behind?

  There was no way to know for certain, but it was also the only clue on which she had to go and therefore could not be ruled out. With no course other than the one upon which she’d decided, Lauren forged eastward to her next vantage point.

  Chapter 34

  Mason residence

  Trout Run Valley

  Monday, March 14th. Early evening

  A trio of esteemed servicemen, comprised of Dave Graham, Woo Tang, and unit second-in-command Tim Reese, gathered on the Masons’ front porch to wait for Fred to join them. At fifteen minutes past his anticipated time of arrival, he was concluded a no-show, and the group continued inside deprived of his escort.

  Woo Tang led the others a short way through the home and into the basement, where a group of faces mostly unfamiliar to them awaited. The open floor plan there had been rearranged to contain the provisional emergency relocation of the FOL, or forward operating location, the unit’s support center for sustained operations. Some last-minute repositioning had taken place to quarter this evening’s meeting. Furnishings and fixtures had been pushed to the walls, opening the center space, and extra chairs had been brought in along with a folding table, which was set up at the far end near the doorway to Fred’s gun cave. The usual assortment of candles had been lit, and a dozen or so gas lanterns had been brought in and set ablaze to better illuminate the space.

  Megan Mason had been sitting next to her mother, and when she saw Dave breach the stairwell, she rose excitedly and ran. “Uncle Dave!” she called to him.

  The rock-solid lines and crevices accenting the veteran’s expression went slack, and he opened his arms to her. “Well, look who it is. My favorite niece.”

  Megan fell into his embrace and hugged him. “Quit it. I’m your only niece.”

  “Making you the favorite by default.” Leaning, he kissed the top of her head. “It’s been too long. How’ve you been getting along? Other than growing like a wildflower.”

  Meg shrugged and pulled away slightly to look him over. “Okay, I guess. A lot better now that you’re here.”

  Dave expelled a mild grunt, denoting his approval. “We waited for the old man a while outside, but he never showed. Any idea where he’s hiding?”

  Megan went sullen in an instant, turning her head away and lowering her arms.

  “Meg?”

  “He isn’t hiding. Dad doesn’t hide, he just…self-medicates and sleeps. Some days more than others.”

  Dave’s chest expanded. “Probably best to let him be, then. He’ll come around when he’s up to it.”

  “Yeah, I guess. If he’s up to it.”

 
Dave tilted, slashing the volume of his voice. “How often?”

  “Every day. It wasn’t a big deal at first, but he’s gotten worse, especially since…” She trailed off, glancing at her mother.

  Kim locked eyes with Megan and sent a searing look while discreetly shaking her head in the negative, putting her on notice.

  “I-I just worry about him,” Megan finished.

  “You’re a good kid, Meg, very devoted,” said Dave. “Your old man’s a warrior. Now and again, warriors need time and space to work their shit out—pardon my French. It’s best to give them that time and space.” He squeezed her shoulder and sent her an encouraging smile. “Damn, you’ve grown into a head-turner. I bet the boys around here won’t leave you alone.”

  Meg turned a shade of red and rolled her eyes. “What boys? No one around here cares.”

  “I highly doubt that.” Dave bade her return to her seat and followed up by walking her there.

  Upon his return, Woo Tang signaled ahead to the table at the far end. “Allow me to usher you to your pulpit. Your parishioner flock awaits.”

  “That’s cute, Tang. A hair sacrilegious, but cute.”

  “Forgive me. Word has it my sense of humor is in need of some calibration.”

  “I’d wager it’s well within benchmark. It’s the timing that’s a little off.”

  Woo Tang displayed a rare look of uncertainty for a second, then forged on, escorting Dave and Tim to where two individuals leaned against the faux-wood paneled wall at the room’s edge. “Allow me to introduce Jade Hensley and Ken Winters, both of whom have charitably dedicated their time and expertise to aiding the sorting out of matters post-incident. Jade, Ken, to you I present Dave Graham, unit commanding officer. The behemoth towering above us is Sergeant Tim Reese, our number two.”