The Liar

by Bobby Adair

  Tommy patted his M4. “So we can convince whoever is in the control room to let us in?”

  “And open the cells to let Emma and those girls out,” said Summer.

  “And the good deputies and honest city cops.”

  “If they haven’t been killed already.”

  “Let’s hope they’re alive.” Tommy unbuckled his safety harness and started to climb out. “Switch seats with me. They might hassle us at this roadblock on the highway up here because of what we did earlier.”

  “You think they’ll recognize us? You think we’ll have to shoot our way through?”

  Tommy angled the rearview mirror to face Summer, to remind her of the shiner he gave her back at the ranch house. “Half the people in town know who you are and I’m not wearing the kind of face at the moment that’s easy to forget.”

  “We could get on the bike path again,” suggested Summer, unbuckling and climbing out of the Razor.

  “That would take time we don’t have,” said Tommy. “Besides, there’s a solid chance the path is already blocked by the fire.”

  “I wish Barry would answer his phone.”

  Chapter 25

  Tommy heard sirens blaring again as he and Summer rounded the last curve and started the slow descent into Spring Creek. The taste of ash was back in the air and smoke washed everything to gray. The sparkle of Spring Creek’s grid of streetlights and homes cut through the growing night, as the terrible orange blaze on the mountain towered over the city.

  “My God.” Summer was transfixed. “Half the mountain is on fire.”

  And some of the houses on the edge of town.

  Tommy kept that to himself, because gunfire thundered in the distance, making it sound like they were racing into a war zone.

  In a quiet voice, as though she’d only meant it as a thought, Summer said, “There won’t be anything left of our country when this is through.”

  The lake came up on the right, not close, but visible. More of Spring Creek’s sprawl cluttered the fields along the two-lane highway.

  “I see the roadblock,” said Summer.

  Tommy couldn’t see it, not exactly, as he looked past to see a long line of headlights stopped on the road. “I know this doesn’t sound like a plan, but listen to me when we get up there. If things turn bad, I’ll do the shooting. You do the driving.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s important you understand this. Don’t take off unless I give you the order.”

  “Got it.”

  When they’d passed through this same checkpoint earlier, there’d been two cars, two trucks, and ten men and women controlling traffic. One of them had been a deputy. Tommy doubted they’d all still be there, given everything that had happened was still happening, so he prepared for steep odds. He set the fire mode selector on his M4 to auto. He needed to maximize his firepower.

  “Do you want me to stop when we get there?” asked Summer.

  “Approach like we expect to get through.” Tommy unbuckled his harness and shrugged his shoulders out.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’ll be better if I’m not constrained if I do have to shoot. Keep that in mind when you run for it.”

  “I won’t throw you out.” Summer let off the gas. The roadblock was coming up quickly.

  Cars were parked on the shoulders on both sides of the highway. The bright headlights from the cars heading out of town silhouetted the shapes of people with guns.

  “The sheriff’s car is gone,” observed Tommy.

  “Probably went to chase us,” guessed Summer.

  They were down to twenty and rolling to a stop.

  More than just the deputy was gone. The checkpoint was down to half-strength as far as Tommy could tell.

  Two men were standing back to back on the center stripe, one checking with drivers on the southbound side, doing his best to keep the line moving. Both were casting regular glances toward town and the distracting gunfire coming from there.

  The man handling the Razor’s side of the road held up a hand for them to come to a stop.

  No other cars were lined up to get into town.

  “You see those two on the shoulders?” Summer pointed without taking her hands off the wheel.

  “I got ‘em,” Tommy told her. One stood just off the asphalt to his right. The last was on the shoulder across the road—a stocky woman, made to look thicker because of the body armor she wore over her torso. Tommy counted only four of them. All looked worn from a long day, and probably a long night or two before. Revolution was hard on the body, or so Tommy was finding out.

  Tommy laid his M4 across his lap, right hand over the trigger guard, barrel pointing left. Three of the 704s were on that side of the car. He drew his pistol with his left hand and slid it between the seats where no one would be able to see what he held there. He kept his eyes on the guard standing on the edge of the asphalt to his right.

  Summer stopped the Razor.

  The 704 in charge of inbound traffic, apparently seeing the bloody jackets Tommy and Summer wore, felt safe, and let his rifle dangle on a shoulder strap. He leaned with two hands on the roll bar over Summer’s door. He said, “Sweet ride. I’ll bet this thing tears up the—”

  The truncated sentence was all the warning Tommy needed to hear to know that they’d been recognized. Or suspected. The difference was moot. He pulled the pistol out in a flash and fired three rounds at the guy standing to his right. He added two more because his aim wasn’t as good with his left hand. The guy was falling as Tommy dropped his pistol, put his hands on the M4, and turned to face the others.

  A woman screamed.

  The 704 at Summer’s door dove out of the way before Tommy could bring his rifle to bear. Summer gunned the engine and the Razor leapt down the road.

  “Stop!” Tommy ordered, knowing her instinct to flee was a mistake and he’d just compounded it by telling her to stop.

  She mashed the brakes, throwing Tommy forward as he tried to get to his feet and stand in the seat.

  More women screaming, but not Summer.

  Men shouted.

  Horns honked. Engines revved and tires spun.

  One of the 704s started shooting.

  Surprise was completely lost. Tommy’s plan, what there was of it, had gone to shit.

  Plan B materialized in a desperate flash. He yelled, “Go! Haul ass.” He rolled out of the car on the passenger side and hit the pavement as the Razor’s engine whined. Wheels spun, and Summer shouted something he couldn’t make out.

  Both 704s in the center of the road aimed their rifles at the receding Razor, one firing, one trying to put a bead on it. Both were suffering from the tunnel vision focus battle stress can induce, and neither noticed Tommy prone in the pavement six meters in front and to their right. He fired four fast bursts in their direction, not stopping until each person was reeling and falling backwards from the momentum of the bullets tearing through flesh. Bullets hit sheet metal on the Suburban behind them as well, and it was lurching forward to move away from the firefight.

  Although horrible thoughts tried to torture Tommy’s focus away from the firefight, he brushed them aside, and for his last target.

  The rolling Suburban exposed the stocky woman. She wasn’t moving for cover, wasn’t looking for threats. She was focused on the Razor’s gaudy taillight array and trying to line up her target, apparently taking care not to hit one of the cars in between.

  It was an easy shot. Tommy aimed for her hips, unprotected and fleshy, a large target with plenty of lethal possibilities. He fired three rounds. The woman spun awkwardly, and fell into the ditch.

  All of the cars lined up to get out of town were moving by then. People were screaming, and Tommy knew he couldn’t stay in the road unless he wanted tire tracks over his back. He jumped to his feet and ran for the cover of a car parked on the shoulder behind him.

  Two cars raced through the roadblock, speeding south to get away.

  Somebody wa
s wailing.

  More cars were speeding up to blast through the checkpoint.

  Tommy scanned for more targets, making sure there was no enemy out there who’d gone unseen.

  The Suburban that had been first in line at the roadblock was now down the road a bit, rolling slowly into the ditch with a dozen holes in its doors.

  “Shit.”

  ***

  Summer had the Razor idling a hundred meters away.

  Tommy waved at her as he ran across the road, hoping she saw what he was up to.

  A car swerved around him and bounced over one of the bodies only a few feet away.

  When Tommy reached the Suburban, it had come to a stop with its front bumper jammed into the dirt on the far side of the ditch.

  Another car ran over the bodies of the downed 704s in the road. The whole line of fleeing cars was picking up speed.

  Tommy looked inside the Suburban. Two kids were in the back seat, uninjured, huddled against the far door. A woman was in the passenger side of the front seat, trying to corral the kids away from Tommy. A man was buckled into the driver’s seat, coughing blood and gasping for breath. Tommy yanked the door open and the cab light came on.

  The woman cursed and pleaded.

  “I won’t hurt you,” Tommy told her, as he looked the man over. He looked like a regular guy with a job, a mortgage, and zero interest in any of the political shit raining down on Spring Creek. He was just trying to get his family to safety, and he was bleeding from two bullet wounds in the side of his torso, and another one in his chest. His left arm was torn open and he had a nasty wound on his leg pumping blood out in spurts. All of the bullets buried in his body came from Tommy’s gun. They were the ones that had missed his targets, the ones he’d fired because he chose auto instead of semi when he was riding up to the roadblock.

  The woman was still screaming at him, and wailing for her husband. The kids were crying, yet there was nothing Tommy could do for the man or any of them. No correcting the mistake. No making it better, and his ineffectiveness felt like a ton of black dog shit weighing him down to Hell. He told the woman, “Get out of here. As fast as you can.”

  ***

  Tommy climbed into the Razor.

  Summer raced up the road as he settled into his seat. “Are you shot?” Her face was animated with stress.

  Tommy looked down at himself, and he ran a hand over his chest. “No. It’s not my blood.”

  “Why did we have to stop?” She yelled. “Why not just—”

  “I had to kill them all,” Tommy explained.

  “Revenge? Are you kidding me?”

  “No,” Tommy told her. “So none of them could call in a warning that we were coming.”

  Summer wanted to curse but ground her teeth instead. “The people in the Suburban?”

  Tommy shook his head. “I didn’t intend to, but I killed the driver.”

  “Innocents?” Summer asked.

  Tommy nodded and tried to keep the guilt of it from crawling in too deep. Innocents weren’t supposed to suffer, and it always felt bad when they did. No wonder the generals and politicians all had a special, dehumanizing phrase for the innocents who died when those assholes swung their megaton military peckers in the face of the world. They called them ‘collateral damage.’

  Summer rounded another curve. Flashing red and blue lights filled the road ahead. The scream of sirens grew to a deafening level.

  “The hospital is up here,” shouted Summer, as she slowed the Razor.

  Tommy wrangled his attention out of his self-blame over the man in the Suburban as he looked down the road. A policeman was in the middle, wearing a reflective vest, holding up a hand for them to stop so he could allow vehicles out of the hospital parking lot.

  Tommy glanced up at the mountainside. The blaze was stampeding through the trees up there. It was only a matter of time before it engulfed Spring Creek.

  “They’re evacuating the hospital.” Summer looked at the M4 lying across Tommy’s lap. “What do—”

  “Don’t stop,” Tommy told her. “The ditch looks drivable. Take it!”

  Summer gunned the engine and swerved off the road.

  The cop cursed and waved an angry fist at them.

  ***

  A quarter mile closer to town, Summer pulled back onto the road between a slow-moving bus and an ambulance running with flashing lights but no siren. Most of the vehicles in the medical convoy were blaring loud, some weren’t.

  “They have to be headed for the highway,” said Summer, guessing the obvious.

  I-70 was the major east-west highway through Colorado, cutting through the northern side of Spring Creek. It was the one Tommy could see from out on his deck at home, far enough away that he couldn’t hear the traffic, far enough that the headlights and taillights glowed mesmerizing red and white running in both directions.

  “They’re probably going to the hospital in Vail,” Summer guessed again. “Do you think they’d go all the way down to Denver?”

  “Why, are you thinking of hiding in the convoy as a way to get back to the city?” asked Tommy. “Are you thinking of trying to find your son?”

  Summer shook her head while the expression on her face exposed the lie. “Denver’s a deathtrap. I’ve seen the videos.”

  “Drop me up here and make your getaway if you need to,” Tommy offered.

  Denver was devouring itself in a rabid fit of political rage. Firebombs and bullets had become the language of persuasion as old agreements to disagree finally became too intolerable to endure.

  Of course, the same thing was happening in Spring Creek. It sounded like open war, the kind you saw on the news in those dusty cities with foreign names full of brown people who some Americans chose not to give a shit about because they looked different and dressed weird. The explosions looked too fake for Hollywood and the guns all of them kept shooting sounded like angry toys, noisy with lots of firecracker pops, not real, powerfully booming, Dirty Harry hand cannons.

  The only things that seemed real in those news vids were the shattered buildings, because they looked like those monotone post-apoc art pieces you saw on the internet. And the stiff bodies of the kids, pulled from a building that collapsed three days ago, or the ones dusted in white from the gas attack that constricted their muscles into tight ropes and spasmed the last breath out of their lungs. And the crying mothers and wailing uncles. You never saw that kind of unadulterated death in Hollywood glam-violence action porn. Corpse piles on that scale only showed up in grainy black-and-white photos and clips from old war newsreels.

  The only difference in all of it? A firestorm was coming, not a metaphorical-hyperbolic-bullshit firestorm, but real goddamned flames tall enough to kiss the clouds and push a hot wind hard enough to suck you in from a block away. And when they were through, there’d be nothing left of Spring Creek but blackened bodies, rusted hulks, and sterile ash.

  “How are they going to get through town?” asked Summer. “With all the fighting?”

  Tommy glanced back at the bus tailgating them. The driver was wearing a 704 jacket. One of his comrades stood bedside him, grasping a hand-hold, wearing an angry face with a busy mouth. Tommy said, “Who gives a shit?”

  Summer’s phone rang, surprising them both.

  Tommy checked the incoming call, “I think it’s Barry or Allan.”

  “Answer it.” Summer took a sharp right turn to pull into a neighborhood of expensive homes bordering the lake. “I can’t go to Denver. There’s no point.”

  “He’s still your son.” Tommy wondered if one day he and Emma could be so estranged. Maybe the day after he told her who he really was.

  “No.” Summer was firm. “I can remember him the way he was before his father twisted him. I can’t live with knowing the hate he feels toward me is real. If I find him, and he tells me in person, then it’ll be real.”

  ***

  Out of the Razor again, Tommy traded the magazine on his rifle for a full one from the sup
plies strapped into the back. He removed the bloody 704 jacket and put on a combat vest with room for several more magazines. And he watched the houses he could see on the curved road. Lights were on inside. People were moving about, busy. Garage doors were up and cars were being loaded.

  Everybody in town could see the fire on the mountain. They all knew it was coming.

  “We’re running out of time,” Tommy told Summer.

  She hung up the phone, followed Tommy’s lead, and removed her 704 jacket. She started the engine. “That was Allan. He says it’s chaos in town.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “They sent links and login info for that shared folder to everyone they’re in contact with.”

  “At least they did something.”

  “They located two detention sites already,” said Summer. “They freed nearly three hundred people.”

  “And the county jail?” asked Tommy.

  “Not there.” Summer shook her head. “Two sites northeast of us, in the mountains.”

  “Are the people who were freed—is that who’s fighting in town now?”

  “No, not mostly. Allan says two more groups are engaged with the 704s there.”

  “People you know?” asked Tommy.

  “People I know of. Some of them anyway.”

  “Are they working together?”

  “Allan says they have some communication with them, but no, not yet.”

  “Where’s the fighting?”

  “Mostly in the north, between downtown and I-70.”

  “Do we know who’s winning?”

  Summer shrugged. “Anybody who thinks they know is probably lying. But Allan says folks are starting to fight back.”

  Tommy looked around at the loaded cars and the rushing people. “I think they’re rising up and getting out of town.”

  “What are you and I going to do?”