Death Across the Lake

by Lyle Hightower

  We walked down the main road, the one that cuts through Swanton and St. Albans. It was dangerous, but it would save us hours, maybe even a day of walking, and we were bound to be safe at least as far south as St. Albans, where we would cut inland and go through the bush the rest of the way, to avoid detection by Minutemen patrols. We reached Swanton by late afternoon that day. The road didn’t go through the town, but we could see it from the highway interchange, an old gas station the most prominent sign of civilization. The underground cisterns were surely used to store water these days, and a small shanty town had grown up around it. We pushed on, and a few minutes south of the junction, we saw a lone figure coming the other way. It was a hot day, and the figure was reflected in the heat mirage that warped and woofed on the highway ahead. We could soon see that it was a boy, not more than ten years old, carrying a bundle with him that looked like a sheaf of rye or barley. We stared at him as we moved towards each other and he too seemed to be looking at us.

  Suddenly there was a movement by the side of the road in a stand of trees close to us. Shots rang out, and Irene started running in the opposite direction, towards the median, dragging Morty and I by our sleeves. Bullets hit the ground near my feet and whizzed by my head, and by some miracle none of us were hit. Irene, clearly alarmed but still with her wits about her, trained her gun on the part of the trees where the gunfire was coming from and started firing. I started shooting as well, but then gunfire started coming from a position further down the highway, closer to where the boy had been. He was still there, frozen in his tracks, safe for now, but clearly terrified.

  “I think we miscalculated,” I said.

  “You think?” Irene said. “I don’t know how to get out of this one. Our ammo is not going to hold out for long, and there’s nowhere for us to go.”

  “We can crawl back along the median,” Morty said.

  “Unless we’re shooting back,” Irene said between bursts, “we can only go so far before they advance, and then we’re toast.”

  I looked back at the boy. He was still standing there, not moving. I looked to the stand of trees furthest from us, and soldiers were starting to emerge in formation from the trees. I shot at them, missed, and and then looked at the boy. He looked at me, a panicked expression on his face, and then he dropped his sheaf and ran in the other direction.

  There was a loud bang, and then another. Dirt fell on us from above, and a smoke grenade went off next to me, and then it was impossible to see. I heard boots, and then a shape came at me through the smoke. I felt something heavy and hard hit me, and then everything was black.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  I awoke to a familiar face. It was Leffert, looking down at me, his fatigues dirty and worn around the cuffs. Behind him I could just about make out six or seven Empire State Militia, guns drawn, pointed at Irene and Morty, who were on the ground like I was, and just like I was they were tied up, their feet and hands bound.

  “It’s over, Bailey. We have the documents you stole. I just wanted you to know who it was who was responsible for your untimely death.”

  I tried to spit on him, but I missed, the spittle landing in the dirt next to my head. He kicked me in the gut, and I started to wretch.

  “You people are worms. I grant you your heist was pretty daring, but you were never going to get away with it. Miller, what time is it?”

  “Eight P.M. Sir.”

  “We’ve got to get back across the lake, but I’m just trying to figure out what order to kill you in. I’ll kill this one first,” he said, pointing at Morty, “because I don’t think he cares about the two of you at all, so he’s not going to take your deaths too hard. No, the question is who cares about the other more? Is it McGill for you? Or you, Bailey, for McGill?”

  He paced back and forth a few times, as if trying to decide. He seemed genuinely to be having a tough time making a decision.

  “I’m gonna have to flip a coin,” he said, reaching into his pocket. He pulled out an old quarter. “I keep this for good luck. 2014, good year, I hear. Call it in the air, Bailey.”

  He flipped the coin, and I spat again.

  “Sonofabitch,” he yelled, and kicked me again.

  “I’ll call ‘tails’ for you.”

  He flipped it again.

  “Well, it’s tails, which means I’m going to kill this one first,” he said, walking over to Irene.

  “Miller, give me your gun.”

  The soldier walked over to him and reached for his sidearm.

  “Your rifle, shitbird,” he said. Miller handed him his rifle. Leffert pointed it at Irene’s head. She looked at me, a cold, completely absent expression on her face.

  “She looks resigned to her fate, I think,” Leffert said. “I think I made the right choice. It’s you that’s going suffer, watching me kill her.”

  Leffert looked distracted for a moment, and then looked down the road. I twisted around to try to look. Against the darkening sky was the light of torches, held aloft by at least two dozen men and women. With them was the boy.

  “You all need to leave,” said an older man holding a pitchfork who stood at the front of the assembled townsfolk. They stopped about twenty yards away, surveying the scene. They were in a tight bunch, as if afraid to spread themselves out too much.

  “This is none of your business, old man,” Leffert called out, clearly annoyed, his New York accent suddenly coming to the fore.

  “You have no jurisdiction to execute the law in this state,” the old man said, undaunted. “As such, if you kill these people, it’ll be murder. We will kill you if we have to, to stop you from doing that.”

  The man’s voice was odd. There was no hint of threat, or anger in his voice. He spoke simply as though he were stating a fact, one he had no feelings about one way or the other.

  “You need to leave, now. You need to go back across the water,” he said.

  “Men, weapons up,” Leffert said, and his troops formed a line, ready to take on the townsfolk.

  “This is your last warning,” the old man said, to which Leffert laughed.

  The old man walked forward a step, and then turned to the side and walked a few paces. At some silent signal the first row of men and women with pitchforks, as well as the boy, seemed to melt away, moving fluidly to each side, revealing a row of townspeople, kneeling, rifles raised. Leffert saw this and opened his mouth to speak, but it was too late, and the townspeople opened fire with their ancient hunting rifles. Every single soldier, and Leffert, fell to the ground. The townsfolk aimed again, hit the few soldier who were still alive and trying to get up.

  Leffert, lying on his back, sputtered and swore. It seemed as though no matter how hard he tried, he could not move. A bullet had entered his neck, and though he was alive, it seemed as though he was paralysed.

  “Sonofabtich sonofabitch,” he whispered. He struggled to take in breath. The old man walked up to him, pitchfork still in hand, and looked down at him.

  “We have what we need here,” the old man said in a low and even voice. “We are prejudiced against no man or woman. We want only to live, to live our way, and to share our bounty with those who would share theirs with us. We cannot have your kind here.”

  Leffert stared at him, a look of confusion on his face.

  The old man lifted up his pitchfork, spikes pointed downwards, and in a swift, almost effortless motion, brought it down onto Leffert’s chest, piercing him through the heart.

  He felt nothing of course, but a whistling noise, a stifled scream, came from his mouth, and then the light went out of his eyes.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  It was easy enough to get back to town after that. The townsfolk put us up for the night in a lean-to near the old gas station. In the morning the old man, who had said almost nothing since he’d killed Leffert, woke us up with a breakfast of oats and a couple of apples to share between the three of us.

  “You’d better be going. We don’t mind feeding you, but we don’t want t
o bring hell down on our shoulders, if you understand me.”

  We did, and we left shortly afterwards. It was a long walk, and we didn’t get back into town until well after dark. When we finally arrived, walking over the Winooski bridge, there seemed to be no one around. We had encountered a few Minutemen patrols along the way, and we hid in the underbrush so as not to be seen, but there were fewer patrols than we had expected, and we were all surprised at how quiet the city was. Church Street was abandoned, and the few people who poked their heads out the window to see who was walking down their street pulled their heads in abruptly when I waved at them.

  We got to the station house, which was mostly dark, save one light on in the doorway. The door was locked, but I still had my key, and we went in. I turned back to see Morty still standing in the street.

  “Oh, yeah, you might not want to come in here,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “You’ll let me know about that pardon, right?” he asked, though I think he didn’t dare to dream it would actually happen.

  “I will Morty. I promise. In the meantime, find a doctor. I can’t have you walking around my town with shrapnel in your gut.”

  He turned, and started walking down Church Street, and then turned onto King towards the water, limping slightly.

  “Why is there no one around?” Irene said, once I had locked the door behind us.

  “It’s creepy. Something must’ve happened.”

  It was dark inside. We got to the briefing room, and there was chief, the mayor, and six uniforms, McHale and Velasquez among them. They looked crestfallen, anxious, but their faces lit up when they saw us.

  “Jesus Christ almighty. We thought you were dead,” Chief said. Then he looked us up and down. “Rough time out there eh?”

  “What’s going on here? Where is everybody?” I asked.

  “The town is awaiting a full-scale Minutemen attack. We’ve got uniforms keeping an eye out on the major routes into town, and they’re massing at all of them.”

  “We didn’t see anyone at the Winooski bridge,” Irene said.

  “They’re hiding in Essex, just down the road. They could probably get to the bridge in under an hour. We’re just waiting for the hammer to fall. I made the call already, for any of our people who wanted to escape, to let them know they can leave. No one left. Everyone’s still here.” Chief looked proud. The mayor had a tear in her eyes.

  “Did you bring us back anything,” she asked.

  “We did,” Irene said. “We found Leffert’s master list of operatives. I just need to correlate the list on paper with the data on this stick.”

  “How long will that take?” Chief asked.

  “An hour, if I hurry.”

  “Well, then do it. We may be done for, but at least we can go out doing our jobs.”

  With that Irene ran to the library to do her work, McHale escorting her, though she hardly needed protection. She still had the plundered Militia assault rifle slung over her shoulder, and after seeing her in action over the preceding week I wasn’t too worried for her safety.

  An hour went by, and Chief kept in radio contact with the scouts he had sent out. There was still no movement, no sign that an attack was immediately impending. He wondered aloud what they could be waiting for. Leffert had followed us across the lake with a detachment of his own soldiers. The thought did occur to me that he could have been directly involved in a coordinated operation with the Minutemen. If he had agents in town, they could be acting as provocateurs, aiding the operation through sabotage or other tactics.

  Irene came running back in holding a piece of paper. McHale sauntered in after her.

  “I’ve got a list of all of Leffert’s agents in town,” Irene said.

  She handed it to Chief. “This is a laundry list of the town’s wealthiest people, and a bunch of scumbags from down by the water.”

  “It includes Harry Smith,” I said.

  “Are we really that surprised,” said the mayor.

  “They wouldn’t necessarily all be operational,” Irene said. “Some might be just for information gathering.”

  “Well, we’re going to start at the top, and arrest every single one of these assholes,” said Chief. “McHale, split the team up, take the two trucks, and start picking these people up.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  We worked through the night and into the next day. There were thirty seven people on the list who lived in Burlington, and we knocked on every single person’s door. If they weren’t home, we knocked on their neighbour’s door. In the end, we’d found most of them, so many people at once that we didn’t really have room for them in the jail. As they were all most likely guilty of espionage against the state, they were going to have to go to Montpelier, but there was no question of convoying them out now, what with the Minutemen blockading the city. We expected that after the invasion, they’d all be released anyways. But then something happened.

  We started to get reports from the scouts out at the city limits that the Minutemen could no longer be seen. A few scouts even saw them withdrawing. We started interrogating our captives, a motley crew of wealthy merchants and traders as well as a fair number of lake rats, drunks and soldiers of fortune who hung out at the docs.

  Needless to say, a lot of the interrogation came down to me, and I stayed up for nearly seventy-two hours, carrying them out, taking short naps when I could. The atmosphere in the station house was one of anxiety and muted excitement. A picture started to emerge as we picked off the small-fry, the dockside hustlers and petty thieves with no real loyalty to Leffert’s cause. Harry Smith, the owner of the Smith House Hotel, was a different matter. We started on him early, had him sweat it out for twenty-four hours in an interrogation room with a rotating cast of uniforms asking him mostly pointless questions, just to tire him out. I or Chief would make an appearance, ask a pointed question or two, and then disappear again so the uniforms could go back to asking him about the weather. We put him back in his cell for fifteen minutes, making him think he was going to get some beauty rest, and then we hauled him back in, and I took over the interrogation full time.

  “The way it looks to me, you’ve only got one option, which is to tell us what you stood to gain from working for Leffert. Rich guy like you hanging around with a working-class bum like that, there must have been something pretty significant in it. Let me guess, he was gonna make you the mayor,” I said to him after a few moments of chit chat that he didn’t seem to enjoy too much. He had a black eye and a split lip, probably the handiwork of one of our guys at some point in the preceding three days. “So your option is this: explain everything, and maybe they won’t hang you for treason.”

  “You really think the legislature will stand for this?” he answered.

  “They’ll do whatever they need to to save face. About half of those people are champing at the bit to string up a guy like you, a poster boy for out of state influences trying to ruin the place. The other half probably would prefer not to hang one of their own kind, but they’ll do it if not doing it means the legislature is overrun with Farmers Union members upset that you had their Grand Poobah killed. And don’t count on the State Troopers or Montpelier Police to protect you either. You’re going to be all by your lonesome real soon, unless you sing.”

  I liked to lay it on thick with these types. I had a reputation to uphold. Far be it from me to deny this man the full police detective experience.

  Smith breathed out a long, defeated sigh. He looked deflated; his hands hung by his side, he was slouching in his chair, four days of beard on his chin, his hair a mess. He smelled terrible.

  “Leffert spared me the operational details. Said it was best if I didn’t know any more than I needed to. But I do know that he’d set up a network in the state. He had previously acted as a liaison between the Empire State Militia and the Minutemen. The Minutemen had a plan. First they would take Burlington. They figured they could extract concessions from Montpelier if they struck at t
he economic heart of the state first. Leffert convinced them that they needed more than just to occupy the town, they needed to install leadership that would have legitimacy in the eyes of the people of Burlington. There would be a council, mostly made of people like me, the more successful merchants and traders.”

  “So why have Peck killed?”

  “That? That was just to confuse the issue. Sow discord amongst any factions in town that might have opposed us. Leffert also thought Peck might have put up a fight. He thought it best to get rid of him beforehand. Seemed an extreme measure to me, but I suspected he had other reasons. Framing Nora was just icing on the cake.” Smith seemed to perk up a little. He was erudite, and clearly liked listening to himself speak.

  “When is the invasion happening?”

  “It was supposed to happen last night,” he said. “I imagine my arrest, and Leffert’s death have probably put them on the back foot.”

  “Why do they care if Leffert is alive or dead?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t tell you the details, but Leffert provided them with operational intelligence the Minutemen could never acquire on their own. They’re a bunch of backwoods idiots. They couldn’t plan their way out of a wet paper bag.”

  Smith didn’t have much to say after that. He told me how Leffert had first approached him, about Leffert’s vision for the region. Smith had bought into his dream of a military state that spanned the Northeast from Maine to Pennsylvania. People like Smith would have profited from military contracts and lower taxes. I led him back to his cell.

  “Do you think they’ll hang me?” he asked, though he didn’t seem too interested in the answer.

  “They will if you don’t cooperate. I can imagine the State Troopers will want to debrief you. There’ll be a Senate hearing.”

  He sighed as he sat down on the bench in his cell.

  “We lost, didn’t we,” he said.

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know.