by Bobby Adair
The trees closed in on the road and branches dragged loudly across the truck’s fenders.
The detainees quieted down.
***
The lead SUV in the line took a turn onto another road, worse than any so far, worse than any the luxury SUV looked like it could traverse even with its tough, off-road look. The going grew steep, and the convoy plodded, though no speed was slow enough to ease the bone-jarring concussions every time one of the truck's wheels dropped into a hole.
Tommy didn’t want to believe what Ezz had told him. He didn’t like what it implied for Emma and Faith. Had they been tossed into a pickup and driven to a detention center? Was the guy sitting behind Ezz right, or was detention a euphemism for something much more sinister?
But in America? Tommy’s leaps of faith couldn’t jump that far. No way.
Just no.
This had to be something else. Ezz’s experience as a child in Bosnia had tainted her judgment. How could it not have? Whatever this was, it wasn’t that.
But what?
Too many unknowns were lounging in Tommy’s logical equations. Too much bullshit was in the air. People weren’t behaving rationally. He told himself that was to be expected given the bombing. He’d been downtown. He’d seen with his own eyes what a lone whack-job could do. It was 9/11 on the minute scale of Spring Creek.
A little craziness fit the norm.
Still, Tommy was tied in the back of a truck and being hauled into the mountains by men with loaded guns and dangerously detached eyes. Nothing at the end of this journey was something he wanted. He knew that much.
He knew, too, that if he didn’t start compartmentalizing his problems and dissecting them one at a time, he’d have no hope of solving any of them. So, he tried to push his fears aside and concentrate on the problems at hand. He listed them in his head, prioritized them by urgency, and attacked the topmost one by struggling against the zip tie on his wrists. Busting free and running into the woods might not be the wisest thing to do, however, it would take a few big unknowns off the urgent list.
He twisted, tugged, and pulled some more, digging the plastic straps into his skin, hoping his ability to withstand the pain was greater than the tensile strength of that thin polymer band.
All he earned for his trouble were bleeding cuts.
He tried to tuck his legs beneath his body in an effort to contort his wrists around to the front.
Nothing came of that except cramping muscles, sweat, and the irritation of the people near him.
It was when he stopped struggling and put his mind to coming up with a different escape plan that he felt a chill on his skin and he shivered.
Spring Creek’s official elevation was posted on the sign at the city limit as 9,261 feet. On an average summer day, the nights would cool into the forties and maybe reach the thirties by morning. The column of cars, SUVs, and detainee trucks had been going mostly uphill since leaving town, and the air was becoming as cold as it was thin. Tommy was still wearing just the jeans and t-shirt he’d left the house in hours earlier, back before the cold front had blown the heat and smoke back south.
Now his skin was damp with perspiration. He definitely wasn’t dressed for the temperatures above ten thousand feet.
Problems compounding on problems.
Tommy sighed and hung his head.
“Don’t give up,” whispered Ezz, scooting over to press her warm, yellow fleece against him. She’d apparently read a weather report before leaving the house for the evening.
“Thanks.” Tommy looked up. Not because he felt any better, but because it was the first step. Ezz was right. He couldn’t let the situation beat him, especially if her guess was right about the intentions of the 704 men. “Pass it down to the end, ask if someone down there can untie the knot and get the rope loose?”
“Dumbasses,” muttered the guy sitting behind Ezz.
Ezz looked behind Tommy’s back. “No luck after all that trying?”
“It’s too tight.”
Ezz turned and whispered to the girl to her right. Back to Tommy, she said, “Let me try.”
“You’ll get us all shot,” said the guy behind Ezz, as he pulled his arms close to his back to put some tension in the ropes, just to be a dick about it.
Nevertheless, Tommy and Ezz attempted to put their backs to one another so she could work the knots.
“I can’t reach,” she said.
Tommy elbowed the guy behind him. "Hey, buddy. Can you help us out?"
That guy didn’t respond.
“Don’t,” said the guy behind Ezz.
“Buddy?” Tommy nudged again.
“Hey!” The guy in the cab pounded his fist on the window. “You settle down back there! Get back in your spots before I come back there and thump your heads.”
Ezz glared at the guy but moved back to her place.
Tommy gritted his teeth and stared at the trees moving slowly past.
A shiver ran up his back to remind him of the cold creeping through to his unprotected skin.
He thought of Faith. Was she alive? Had she been brutalized, raped even? And Emma, just sixteen. Was her body sprawled in the dirt at the mouth of an old lead mine, stiffening with rigor mortis, magpies pecking at her face, beaks tearing through her skin?
Another shiver.
Ezz snuggled closer.
***
It might have taken an hour or longer, but the forest finally gave way to a gently sloped meadow of knee-high grass and high-altitude shrubs. The caravan rumbled into the dark and spread into a semicircle. The pickup Tommy rode in rolled toward a slow stop, its tires crunching over a mound of charred branches, the remnants of a campfire from last night or last month, probably from the last time a bunch of teenagers from Spring Creek had driven to the high meadow to drink and kiss by the romantic light of a campfire on a cold night.
High school kids didn’t care about droughts and burn bans. They didn’t mind long, bumpy drives into the mountains. They just wanted to get laid.
The vehicles parked in a ragged arc, all facing east, the beams of their headlamps fading into the distance.
Engines cut.
Lights stayed on.
The paramilitary men climbed from the truck cabs. Booted feet tromped over dry grass.
Orders were called out by a tall, familiar-looking man with distinguished, silver hair rimming a worn hunting cap. A stocky guy with a beard and a round gut that strained the buttonholes of his shirt was unexpectedly offended by the tall man’s apparent power grab. Shouting and strutting, he waved a stapled sheath of papers in the air and marched up to the tall man, countermanding his orders and spewing insults.
Outside of gawking, the 704 men all around didn’t know how to react.
The argument escalated. Name calling and insults followed. It looked to be on the verge of fists. The silver-haired man and the stocky man both thought they were the one in charge.
Some of the camo-clad men took up sentry positions around the trucks, though their attention followed the loud voices of the two vying for power. Other 704s were not so shy, walking over and forming a loose huddle around the arguing men.
“Ezz,” said Tommy, “do you see that tall guy yelling at the bearded man?”
“Uh, huh.”
“Does he look familiar to you?”
“Doctor Kernan.”
“Shit.” Tommy’s assumptions about what he knew flipped them on their heads.
“You know him?” asked Ezz.
“He’s my dentist.”
"Now you know two of them," spat Ezz, "Matt the driver and Kernan the dentist. Look around, you'll recognize more."
“This isn’t any kind of military thing, then,” realized Tommy. “These guys aren’t with the government, are they?”
Ezz shook her head.
“Could they be a police auxiliary?” Tommy was grasping for any hope.
“What are we doing up here if they’re the police?” Ezz started to pull at the zip t
ie around her wrists.
Tommy went back to work at his bindings, hoping his captors’ distraction might coincide with the timely failure of that damned plastic strap. The idea gained sudden popularity with the others in the truck’s bed. The suspension creaked with the shifting weight.
“I know where we are,” he told Ezz.
She grimaced as the straps dug into her skin. “Good for you.”
The alpine meadow the size of a football field lay stretched along the crest of the mountain where its eastern half had been sheared away by a geological event who knew how many millions of years ago. The resulting cliffs stood a thousand, maybe two thousand feet above the valley below. Either way, it was a long, long way down. And that was all Tommy needed to know about that.
From this vantage point, he could see that several hiking trails emptied into the meadow, and apparently the old fire road did as well. The road broke through the dense trees thirty yards behind the trucks. Tommy considered it as his first direction for an escape attempt, but with the road running that way, it might not work out well.
To the south, one of the hiking trails zigzagged down a steep slope past blackened trunks and sparse saplings. A fire some years back had scoured that side of the mountain and the forest hadn’t yet recovered.
North of them the trees were nearly seventy yards distant with dozens of lone pines standing in the meadow along the way, plenty there to ruin the aim of a gunman trying to put a bullet in an escapee’s back. That brought Tommy’s thoughts into focus around Ezz’s fear, that these men were going to kill them all.
Still, skepticism nagged.
Sure America had a political hate addiction, but how could the deluge of obvious lies possibly drive normal people so far past their senses? Past their humanity?
In Tommy’s life, a long time ago, he’d seen the ugly side of human nature. But the people he ran with in those days were the maladjusted exceptions, the misfits. The few. Most of them were dead or in jail. Right where they belonged.
Regular citizen-type folks weren’t like that.
How could mass murder be the outcome of anything in America?
The hows and whys didn’t matter, or so Tommy decided. He wasn’t going to bet his life on a happy outcome. Given the chance, he’d go. No more doubts. No second-guessing. Just running.
“When we get away,” Tommy told Ezz, as he nodded to the north, “that’s our best bet.”
She accepted his scant plan, yet her face was stretched with worry. Her eyes were on the arguing dentist and the big-bellied man set against him. Both them and their audience were drifting toward the truck holding Tommy and Ezz.
***
Kernan’s crisp voice cut the night air, “What you need to understand, McElroy—”
“I don’t need you to tell me what I need to understand,” McElroy hollered back. “I take my orders from Frank Lugenbuhl!”
“Chain of command,” Kernan told him. “No military operation succeeds without it.”
“Frank is my CO, and Frank told me to bring these people up here—”
“To detention,” Kernan explained, leaning close, towering over McElroy, and pointing down the mountain toward the Old Mine Loop. “Detention. It’s a big word. Do you understand what that means?”
“Detention’s temporary—”
“—by definition,” Kernan told him.
“This detention, that holding pen, this containment area, nobody knows where anything is. Nobody knows who’s where.”
Kernan swatted at the list in McElroy’s hand. “Right there.”
“The list is a joke.” McElroy’s words were suddenly measured and ominous. “It’s high time we stop pretending like talking is going to solve this problem. It's time we cut this cancer out. If we want to survive as a nation, we have to do what we have to do."
“Have-to time has not yet arrived.”
“You saw what they did downtown,” McElroy shot back, anger in his voice. “You know. They started it, just like Frank said they were gonna, and we need to finish it before they burn the whole country to the ground.”
Kernan spun and stomped a few steps away, a few steps toward the truck Tommy was sitting in.
The spectators around him drifted along.
He stopped. Thoughts apparently collected, the next argument loaded in the breach, Kernan turned and shook his finger in McElroy’s face. “We’re not doing this. Not now. No matter what you think is going to happen, it’s not. We’re turning this train around and going back down to the detention zone.”
“No we’re not,” McElroy menaced.
Another man stepped between them, “We should ask Frank.”
“I’m in charge here!” shouted Kernan.
“I take my orders from Frank,” McElroy reiterated.
Kernan threw up his hands and shouted at the sky. “Fine. Fine. Fine, goddammit!” He drilled McElroy with his hard eyes and said, “Watts and Baldwin, you two grab a truck and go back to town. Find out if Frank says it’s time to escalate, or if we put these detainees with the others.”
"Melton, Dillard, Ross," ordered McElroy, "you three ride along. Keep the dentist honest.” It was his turn to swagger his macho with a puffed chest and an impolite step toward Kernan. "Just so you know, we're securing these detainees to my satisfaction while we wait. No compromises. No questions. Or I'll shoot ‘em myself and be done with it.”
***
Tommy cursed himself for the mistakes that had led him into a trap he never saw closing in around him. The clues had been there from the moment he’d stepped off the airport shuttle onto the hot asphalt. Matt gave him a tip about this 704 group and Tommy had all but ignored it. The hints kept coming until Tommy found himself bound to a torture chair in a high school coach’s office. And from that moment on, his fate was out of his hands. Now, five men were in a noisy truck headed down the fire road to fetch a clarification from some guy named Frank Lugenbuhl, a man on whose whim Tommy’s life apparently rested.
And that damned plastic strap on Tommy's wrists wouldn't give.
Two men in camo with weapons in hand stood at the back of the pickup in which Tommy sat. A third was ready at the tailgate, and Doctor Kernan stood close, his intense blue eyes watching for mistakes, missing nothing.
Tommy remembered that’s what he’d liked about Kernan—his attention to detail, his focus. Lying in his chair with an open mouth and that bright light shining down, Tommy never felt a twinge of discomfort when Kernan’s powerful drill whined and threatened to shred Tommy’s teeth. Kernan wasn’t the type to make a sloppy slip.
Kernan nodded.
The 704 man at the tailgate unlatched it and yanked it hard, creaking the rusty hinges as he slammed it open. He climbed into the bed and knelt down to work on the knot securing the rope tied to the woman at the end. In the next truck over, McElroy had a pair of his men unloading that group of unfortunates. The rest of the paramilitary men and women stood back, maintaining a perimeter from which to keep watch.
With the rope untied, the guard in the truck unlaced it from the detainees’ arms. Unloading was slow and deliberate, with only one detainee at a time being allowed to move, until all seven of them stood in a line behind the truck—Tommy at the end, Ezz just in front of him.
A ruckus from McElroy’s truck caught everyone’s attention.
A prisoner was running.
The guards were hollering.
The runner’s gait was awkward, off-balance because his arms were still tied behind his back.
He didn’t make it ten yards before he caught the butt of a rifle against his head and went down. Merciless kicking and stomping followed.
McElroy cast his mean eyes at the rest of the detainees. “You run, that’s what you get.”
Two guards lifted the unconscious man and dragged him away.
Nobody from Tommy’s truck chanced a sprint.
On a nod from Kernan, the detainees marched past the pickup from which they’d been unloaded. The militants esco
rted them through the bright beams of the trucks’ headlights.
The dentist hurried past, heading for the front of the line.
Tommy took a chance. “Doctor Kernan?”
Kernan’s sharp eyes fell on Tommy without a hint of recognition.
“I’m Tommy Joss. One of your patients. You did that crown on my molar last fall.”
Kernan blinked, took a moment, and said, “I know who you are.”
“What’s going on?” Tommy pressed. “Why are we here?”
“You were on a list.” Kernan turned and took a hurried step.
“What’s with that list?”
Kernan spun. “It was the list that put you here.”
“What?”
“You disseminated lies and betrayed your country. Nobody forced you to become a traitor. Don’t pretend it’s a mystery.”
“It is,” argued Tommy, as an armed man prodded him to move. “Why won’t you tell me?”
“I did,” said Kernan, ending the conversation with quick steps.
“No talking!” commanded a man as a gun butt smashed Tommy in the back.
Chapter 6
All thirty-seven prisoners were kneeling along the rocky ledge with nothing but the abyss and an icy black sky in front of them.
Fuck McElroy.
That was thought number one in Tommy’s mind every time the cold wind rushing up the face of the cliff blew over the top to push him this way and that.
Ezz knelt a few arm lengths to Tommy’s left, resigned to her fate as she whispered prayers past her soft lips. The woman on the other side of Ezz sobbed. Down near the end of prisoners’ row, a man wailed loudly, grotesquely, without shame. He pled for his life. He begged for a chance to explain himself. He made promises of bribes and favors.
His efforts earned him nothing but stones tossed at his back when the guards nearby got tired of listening. Or more likely, when they wanted to rev him back up again for a laugh.