Death Across the Lake

by Lyle Hightower

  “Especially if someone is looking for you. There’s no better way to be invisible than to embody that which no one wants to see,” he said.

  “That’s why we’ve come here,” Irene said. “We want to ask for your help.”

  “Let’s eat breakfast,” he said. “Always best to have something to eat before listening to a request, especially if you want to give it a fair hearing.”

  He led us back down the embankment and sat us down near the fire.

  “How’s it coming along, Fred,” he said to one of the younger men who was prodding at the fire, and turning the food, mostly carrots and some squirrel. A man nearby was pulling apart bunches of Kale, a woman next to him pounded seeds in a dip in a larger boulder, using the thing like a mortar and pestle.

  After a few minutes Fred pulled the food off the fire, and we were offered a brunch of squirrel, carrots, and a kind of dry salad made from kale and seeds. We all ate, about a dozen of us, and after a few minutes Benji stopped eating and asked us what we wanted.

  “I’m sorry to put you on the spot, but if you’re going to ask me to do something for you, the whole community needs to hear it. I can’t promise of myself, as I am, like each one of us, part of everyone and am owned by everyone.”

  Irene looked at me for a moment, to gauge my reaction. I shrugged. She turned back to Benji.

  “We need to retrieve things, from a place,” she was struggling to find the words without giving everything away. “We need a distraction. We need you to help us by diverting attention away from us.”

  “But we are invisible,” Benji said. “How can we distract anyone?”

  “And what are you trying to retrieve?” a woman called out. Her face was hard and unyielding, skeptical.

  “We have these,” Irene said, opening her bag.

  “What are those,” the woman said. “The woman has metal blackberries, what are these to us?”

  “They are explosives,” Benji said. “I recognize these from old films. Grenades. What would you have us blow up?”

  “The casinos,” I said. “Not entirely. Just make a noise. Just enough so that the Militia thinks it’s being attacked. Then we can do what we need to do.”

  “Why should we bring hard rain upon our heads for your sake,” Fred said.

  “Yes. I am inclined to want to help you, but answer this question,” Benji said, turning to me and Irene.

  Neither of us said anything for a long time, until finally, Irene spoke. “You have your way of living. It is what’s afforded to you, and it’s enough to get by. We live in a place like this, across the water. The Militia wishes to come to where we are, and take what has been afforded us. With these things we wish to steal back what is ours, to be masters of our own place.”

  “Ahhh, said Benji. You want to drive them out. This I can understand. I will have to confer with the people,” he said, holding his hand up and pointing at the assembled people. “Stay by the river, if you like, while we talk. Out on the rock there, it is accessible, the water is low. I like to sit out there when I need to think. If I must think about what you have asked me, I invite you to think as well about what you have asked me, so that we can talk about it again, when we have come to a decision.”

  He was pointing to a flat rock out in the river. Without hesitation Irene got up and started moving towards it, picking her way across the surface of the water, finding stones to walk on. I sat there a moment longer; I didn’t much feel like moving, much less to sit on a wet rock in the middle of the river, but I got up anyway and followed her, as Benji watched me, a big, toothy grin on his face.

  “It is a lot to ask,” Irene said, when I’d finally joined her out in the river.

  “I’m not surprised they’ve banished us to this rock, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, just that it seems obvious to us that they should help us, but for them, if they did nothing, their lives would likely continue unchanged. They taught us at Middlebury that in tactical situations, as well as negotiations, one often has to fall back on a kind of empathy that is in short supply in difficult or stressful situations. It’s important to understand what it is they need. That must seem real obvious, but it’s easy to forget.”

  “Sounds like Benji’s rock plan is working. You’ve gone pensive.”

  She laughed at this. She seemed relaxed in a way I hadn’t seen in her since we left Burlington.

  “Do you think we’ll make it back alive?” she said.

  “You’re the tactical expert, I’m just a cop,” I answered.

  “I know, but I’d still like to know what you think.”

  “I’d like to think that we’re going into this with our eyes open. And that if our eyes are open, we can see what’s coming at us. But maybe that’s just me, trying to be okay with near-certain death.”

  Her expression changed when I said this, and she fixed me with her gaze.

  “We have to get those files back to Burlington, no matter the cost, Bailey. Promise me that above all, you’ll make sure they get back to Vermont. It could change the entire course of the war. It could change everything. Leffert’s network must be destroyed. They’d be blind, and we could root our every saboteur. I promise you Irving Peck’s murder is only the beginning if we don’t succeed.”

  She leaned back and faced the sun. “I know you know this, I just want to be sure that we’re clear on our priorities. Our individual lives don’t matter as much as getting the data back across the lake.”

  I nodded, and laid down on my back, and let the sun warm me up. It was weak and pale that morning, but sustaining somehow, and I fell asleep. We had been out there for hours when Benji called us back to shore.

  “How many grenades?” he asked.

  “Eight,” Irene said. “four smoke, and four incendiary grenades.”

  “And how many of us need to use them?”

  “As many or as few as you want. Ideally they would all go off in the space of a few minutes.”

  Benji looked at the rocky riverbank, and then up at the sky. “We know that one day they’ll come for us too. We’re not immune. We will help you in what way we can.”

  There was risk for them. The townsfolk mostly left them alone, but that didn’t mean they were actually invisible. And if they were caught, who knew what vengeance the Militia would visit on them.

  The only thing left to do was figure out if anyone by the riverside had a working clock. We wouldn’t be able to synchronize our movements if they couldn’t tell the time. Finally it turned out the Rhoda, Benji’s sister, had an old grandfather clock that had been sitting under a pile of blankets in her living room. It was at least two hundred years old, and entirely mechanical. We got it upright and carried it out to Benji’s shack. He seemed nervous about the thing. It didn’t work at first, but Irene fiddle with its innards and it started to tick. I’d thought the ticking was an exaggeration, a story I’d heard as a child, and I marvelled at the idea that we would have ever needed a metronome for everyday life. Benji seemed to find the noise very disturbing, and he scowled at the thing, looking almost like a fearful animal.

  “Ohh I don’t like this thing. Why should my life be parted out in pieces like this. As soon as this is over I’m throwing this thing in the river.”

  Grumbling aside, Benji looked happy, more or less, and he and the other river people seemed as though they felt bigger somehow, proud that they would be part of something of consequence. We left them and returned to the motel.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Morty showed up at the motel at 7 pm, as we’d agreed, carrying a small satchel with him, and a smelling strongly of booze.

  “You nervous, or did you sleep inside a still?” I asked. He glowered at me, though without much intensity, as he was too drunk to focus.

  “Is this going to be a problem?” Irene asked.

  “I can do it. Staaahp worrying ‘bout it.”

  “It’s ok,” I said. “It’ll have to be.”

  We walked along the road to the w
est. We didn’t know exactly how to get to the building but it wasn’t long before we were in familiar terrain. It was dusk, and the streets in the west end were mostly abandoned. There weren’t any Militia patrols either, and the first sign of them was as we approached the building. In the setting sun the building had a tired, run down look to it, the faux rock panelling falling off in places, and several broken plate-glass windows repaired with plywood and metal sheeting with holes cut out for windows. At the entrance there were two soldiers standing guard, and there was an encampment on the grounds in front of the building, and a few stands of trees around the perimeter. It was these that we had run into when we escaped, shielding us from our pursuers’ sight just long enough for us to get away.

  We approached the complex from the south east, where the property was overgrown with trees and underbrush, and there was an emergency exit we thought we might be able to get in through. We would have to wait until there was some sign that Benji and his people had set off the grenades.

  It was getting dark, and we had been laying flat in the undergrowth for a long time. Irene prepared her gun, the one silenced pistol we had between us. I loaded my revolver, but I wouldn’t be able to use it without giving us away to anyone who remained in the building. I would have to count on Irene’s skills with her gun, and use my hands failing that. Morty had sobered up a bit by now, and wore a serious, doleful expression on his face.

  Finally, there was a series of short, sharp explosions in the distance. I counted three, and then a pause, and there was another explosion, followed by another, much larger explosion a split-second later.

  “They’ve hit a gasoline or propane tank, or a gas line with one of the incendiary grenades,” Irene said. More explosions followed, large and small. I hoped none of the river people had been hurt.

  The soldiers in front of the building hit the dirt, and an officer started yelling.

  “Form a perimeter,” she yelled, and the troops, standing up, formed a line at the edge of the property, crouching down, arms at the ready. Dozens more emerged from the building. Another call rang out.

  “Miller, on the radio, see if we can get a fix on what’s happening.”

  We stayed hidden, faces down in the underbrush. Morty flinched when a centipede crawled across his head. I flicked it off and gave him a serious look.

  A few moments later the call came: “East along the roadway. Watch for ambush. Move out.”

  These soldiers weren’t your run of the mill Empire State Militia. They weren’t drunk, for one thing, and most of them looked older than seventeen. If you want to spread chaos and fear, you sent out children with guns. It was a brutally effective tactic, and the Minutemen relied on the same nihilism of disaffected youth to strike fear into ordinary peoples’ hearts, to keep them cowed and compliant. But when it was control you wanted, you sent in the shock troops, and this was what the Empire State Militia was famous for. There was the rank and file, disordered, scared, brutal kids culled from the hinterland. And then there were the elites, the ones they used to guard important installations, or when they needed to carry off an operation that couldn’t rely on brute force and human wave tactics. They were older, better trained and equipped, efficient, and completely ideologically committed. And these were the same ones who, except for the two closest to the door, were now walking away from the building they had been guarding.

  We waited a while, to make sure we would be out of earshot of the departing soldiers, and then proceeded through the underbrush to the side of the building. It was a tall order keeping Morty, who was still a bit under the weather, quiet, stopping him from stepping on twigs, and once he almost fell over. Irene and I guided him slowly, and then when it was clear that the soldiers at the front of the building wouldn’t be able to hear us, we moved quietly towards the metal door, which was in the middle an otherwise featureless, crumbling concrete wall.

  It took Morty a matter of seconds to pick the lock, and once the lock was picked, he nimbly opened the door in total silence. We slipped inside, and just as gently he closed the door, with only the faintest click. We stood still inside the stairwell, looking at each other, waiting for some indication that our trespass had been seen or heard. But after a few moments, it was clear we had gotten away with it.

  Irene pointed upwards silently, and then reminded us that it was the third floor we needed to get to with three upheld fingers. Following her lead, with Morty in the middle, and myself taking up the rear, making sure he didn’t fall, we started climbing the stairs. He was steady now, the adrenaline had sobered him up, I warrant, but I didn’t trust it to last.

  We came to the third floor and, listening again for a moment, we heard nothing and no one. We walked out into the hallway, towards the office. Irene moved along the wall, and looking around the corner, her gun drawn, she motioned for us to follow her.

  The door to the office had been replaced, and was again locked, and again, Morty was able to get through the lock, though it took him a good deal longer than the door into the building. Once we were in the room, Irene silently directed him to the floor safe. Everything was as it had been previously, and she sat down at the computer terminal to see what else of use she could pull out.

  “There’s so much here,” she said. “I don’t know where to start. Most of it isn’t secret. This here looks like census data,” she said, pointing to one part of the screen. I can’t make heads of tails of these things, so I took her at her word.

  “These are Militia-wide bulletins, news, reports. I’ll download everything to my USB stick.”

  “This is going to be easy enough to get through,” Morty said. “But it’s going to make a lot of noise. There’s no other way.”

  “Then we’ll need to be prepared to fight our way out,” Irene said.

  “Is that a surprise?” I said.

  “I guess not,” Irene said. “Let’s just hope that enough of the Militia soldiers are downtown now dealing with those explosions that we can manage it.”

  “I should get to work then,” Morty said, and he opened his bag, pulling out little bits of what looked like moulding putty, and wires. He placed it carefully around the combination tumbler, and the keyhole on the other side. After ten minutes he was satisfied, and pulled out a longer wire and connected it to a little device with a handle, that he tested to see if it turned.

  “Okay, everyone out of the room,” he said, and we walked into the hallway. “Lie flat, just in case,” he said. and we all got down on the ground.

  “Fire in the hole!” and he turned the handle. There was a momentary silence, and then two pops, very loud and strangely high-pitched. A great deal of smoke wafted out the door from inside the room.

  “If anyone is still in the building, we’ve got minutes before they get here,” Irene said.

  We went back into the room, and I watched the door while Morty worked on the safe. The blast hadn’t completely freed the mechanism. He still couldn’t get it open, and using his tools, he had to work at it, shimmying a screwdriver against one of the holes. “This thing is tough,” he said. “But I got it.” Something clicked, and he lifted the door to the safe.

  Irene ran over and looked down into the hole. She pulled out a small notebook, nothing more than an old school notebook, easily fifty years old, with yellowed, crumbling paper, but inside was page upon page of handwritten notes.

  “This is it,” Irene said. “This is everything. These are the keys for the data I’ve got on the USB stick. If we can get this back to Burlington, I can match them up. We’ll know everything. Every agent, every contingency plan, every message drop and courier, everything.”

  The window where we had previously escaped was still broken, and the empty space was covered by plywood, with gaps at the bottom and top. The sound of boots on the ground could be heard. Looking out, at least a dozen militiamen could be seen taking up positions on the lawn. They saw me, and started firing. I ducked down, but bullets tore apart the plywood, sending splinters flying through t
he room.

  “We have to get away from the front of the building,” I yelled. “They’ll scale the wall if they have to.”

  We ran out the door, taking our gear with us, and ran right into a militiaman who was running towards the office. He looked surprised, as if he weren’t prepared, and I realized he wasn’t a soldier at all, but support staff, and he wasn’t armed. Irene was drawing her gun, but I ran at him, and hitting him in the jaw with my elbow, I manage to knock him unconscious.

  “They aren’t all going to be that easy to deal with,” I said, shaking off the pain in my arm. “We have to get out of here somehow, but without having to go through all of them.”

  “They’ll have the exits covered,” Irene said. “There’s no way out of the building without going through them.”

  “You guys didn’t plan for this?” Morty said.

  Irene and I looked at each other. “We had to do this either way,” I said. “There was no way around it.”

  “So we’re stuck?” he said.

  “I have an idea,” Irene said. “We need to find a working radio.”

  “What are we going to do?” I said.

  “We’re going to call in the cavalry.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “There’s got to be an ops room in here somewhere. We need to find it before they try to shut the power off or mount an assault on the building,” Irene said. “Check every room on this floor, I’m sure there’s something here we can use to call for help.”

  “Who are we going to call for?” I said.

  “I’ll explain later, just trust me.”

  We kicked down every door on the third floor. There were offices, abandoned storage rooms, and finally we came to a radio room. I could feel the building vibrate. Dozens of militia troops were filing into the building, working their way through the offices on the lower floors, looking for us.

  The room was a tiny enclosed space, with a broken computer on one desk, and a radio on the other. Irene turned it on, and it seemed to work. She dialled in a frequency and holding down a button on the side of the handheld microphone, started talking.