Wear Something Red

by K.G. Lawrence

  Chapter 47

  The trail took them up along switchbacks, circled the edges of cliffs where it narrowed to barely wide enough for one person, crossed sub-alpine fields of grass and exposed rock. The trees thinned out around them, as did the understory. They were becoming more exposed to the four men coming after them.

  She had the fitness to make the ascent, but her left leg alternated between twitching and stiffening to aching and weakening. With Craig having to constantly support her, it was a miracle they were staying ahead of their pursuers.

  Craig brought them to a plateau of moraine deposited during the last ice age. Huge scars had been scratched into the stone of the plateau by the receding glaciers. The cliff they stopped at provided a view of the last field they had crossed as well as three shallow valleys dug out by the ice.

  “We can see them from here if they come this way.” He sat down at the edge.

  If she sat down, her left leg might not have the strength to get her back up again. She leaned against a waist-high boulder. “Why did they take Shana? Why are we getting farther away instead of going to get her?”

  “We have to survive first before we can do anything. They might take one of the other trails.”

  “You should have brought the launcher.”

  “There was only one rocket left. I didn’t have the chance to fire it down there and I couldn’t carry it, the medical kit and support you at the same time.”

  “You should have tried. You should have at least grabbed the Uzi.”

  “Joan, they were closing but we had some distance between us. I could either take advantage of that distance to keep us ahead of them, or risk having them close on us and not get all of them with only one rocket. I didn’t see the Uzi.”

  “Shit.”

  He was right. There were more than just four men at the farm and they were spread out all over the grounds. He wouldn’t have gotten them all and the survivors would have been on them before they could get away.

  “How did you end up smuggling Zemar and Saleha into the country?”

  “Zemar was sixteen, Saleha was fourteen. They were orphans living on the streets. Like all the other orphans, they would come to our site offering to do work for us. At first, we just shooed them away, but their persistence eventually wore us down. Randal was the first to let them in. Both of them could speak English. Their father had been a scholar before he was murdered because he spoke out for peace and a more secular way of living. He was a graduate of Harvard. He taught them our language and told them all about us. It sounds corny to say it, but he taught them about our sense of individual freedom and belief in democracy. They hold sacred what a lot of us take for granted.”

  “And their mother?”

  “Also a proactive academic, she just disappeared one day.” He tossed a rock over the cliff and watched it fall. “If we could get the one you’re resting against over the cliff, we might do some real damage to them.”

  “Let’s try it.”

  “I did say if. And there’s no guarantee we’d take any of them out.” He looked over the edge one more time. “Zemar was great at organizing and prioritizing the locals. He was a natural at triage. Saleha worked with patients in post-op care. I can’t tell you how many wounds she had to keep clean or bodies she had to wash, but she was there every day. Sometimes it seemed like she was doing the work of four people. Everyone who knows her loves her.”

  Shana included. “What went wrong?”

  “What do you think? The Taliban knows everything over there. They came after Zemar to join them. They threatened to give Saleha to a local pimp. They knew her orientation and wanted to force her to service men. If not that, they’d have her stoned to death.”

  “He joined the Taliban.”

  “He was protecting his sister. We helped him provide incorrect but plausible intelligence reports, but then they decided to use him as a suicide bomber to take us out. They also had a back-up plan. They had another bomber already working with us. Zemar stopped that other suicide bomber, his fifteen-year-old cousin.”

  “He killed him.”

  “They had to go into hiding after that. We were leaving and we couldn’t take them with us. When we found out the Taliban were closing in on them, we went back and got them out.”

  “And because he’d been in the Taliban, there was no chance of becoming a landed immigrant.”

  “Randal had to tiptoe around that issue. He’s been in contact with a buddy at DHS-ICE for the last three years trying to find a way they could come forward. His contact thinks they’re hiding in Mexico seeking asylum. The derailment, that attack in Houston and the elevator explosions ended any chance they had. They’d both be deported the moment they showed themselves.”

  “And that would be a death sentence for each of them.”

  “They’re going to cousins in Brazil now, the family of the boy he had to kill. They’ll get new identities and a chance there at a good life.” He dropped another rock over the edge. “Some crazy shit, huh?”

  “Some crazy shit.”

  “Like digging a tunnel so you can attack your neighbor.”

  “It sounds ludicrous way up here. It is ludicrous. I’ve seen things like that before, but usually only with survivalist nuts and militia digging bomb shelters. One group dug down almost one thousand feet because their leader believed it would prevent neutron bomb explosions from reaching them. The punch line is that physicists took over the tunnel, dug even deeper, filled it with water and all kinds of sensors so they can search for neutrinos.”

  “Like Colter and his men.”

  “Partly, but Colter’s far worse. Those kooks do it because they believe some end of the world thing is coming. They want to be prepared. Colter has a vision. He’s trying to create some legacy he thinks this country needs. That’s why he did it.”

  “At the pinch between our two farms, it would be only about a half-mile from his compound to ours. That’s how they got in to mutilate the elk.”

  “A trial run. I think they’ve done a lot of those.”

  “They took Saleha that way.”

  “We can circle back and take it to get to the Colter farm. It will be our surprise attack.”

  “Circling back is going to have to wait. They figured out which trail we took.”

  A bullet ricocheted off a boulder next to the one she was resting on.

  Craig rolled back from the edge and ran to her. “Rest time is over.”

  “Help me to the cliff.” When he hesitated, she growled, “Now.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He took her arm. “We’re wasting—”

  “Shut-up.”

  At the cliff, he held her by her belt while she looked over the edge. The four men were crossing the field. They were less than a quarter-mile away.

  She took out her Beretta and aimed at them.

  “Isn’t that a waste of bullets?”

  “I want them to know we’re still armed. We’re not just elk they can hunt at their leisure. I want to take one of those bastards down if I can.”

  She fired six shots. One whizzed by Bobby’s head. He swatted at it as if it were a bee. The other five struck the ground in front of the thick network installer.

  The four men scattered for cover behind rocks.

  “I wish I had a slingshot.” Craig looked around. “I could throw a few at them. That might scare them off.”

  “It may come to that.” She took another few shots at Bobby.

  The bullets landed three feet to the left of the boulder he was crouching behind.

  “The wind’s too strong.”

  Craig pulled her back from the edge just before a fusillade of bullets broke off a section of it.

  She picked up a rock, though bending over almost toppled the both of them, and threw it at the four men before Craig took them higher up into the mountains.

  That had been Shana’s scream coming from the tunnel. What were they doing to her in there?