Pressure (Book 1): Fall

by Thomson, Jeff

  And the irritating thing, the maddening, frustrating, damned-near make him want to go postal thing about those people, Charlie thought, as the maximum density of the lady in pink tights slowly made her way in front of him, was that if you called them on it, if you tried to point out their abject selfishness, their unmitigated obliviousness, their egocentric, to Hell with everyone, me-first attitude, you would only succeed in offending them, incurring their wrath and opening yourself up to a flurry of litigation designed with the sole purpose of making their wanton disregard for anyone but themselves your fault. It was enough to make him want to pull his Colt .45 and start blasting away.

  The better angels of his nature, however, kept the firearm safely tucked into the holster beneath his coat and clipped to his belt at the small of his back. Whatever confusion he felt about his current situation, he knew with absolute certainty that it would not be improved by a random act of violence.

  Another man and two women slipped into the aisle behind him. They started shoveling coffee into their carts. I’m not the only one thinking of disaster, he thought, willing the stupid bitch in front of him to pick up the pace. Madame pink tights cheese curd butt, on the other hand, remained oblivious and wrapped up in her own self-absorbed world. She stopped dead in her tracks to answer a text message. He really wanted to shoot her.

  He spun the cart around, and went back the way he came. The man cast a nervous glance in his direction.

  They’re scared.

  So, he thought, am I.

  He needed a plan.

  What he wanted was somebody to come up with the plan for him. He’d always been good at spotting and analyzing problems, but not-so good figuring out what to do about them. The problem (a): was what to do about the truckload of guns. The best solution he could come up with was (b): to turn them in to the appropriate controlling civilian authority. This much was simple. The fly in the proverbial ointment, however, was how to get from (a) to (b) without running into assholes, idiots, or people who might think it would be fun to put a bullet in his brain.

  The situation, vis-a-vis the continuing earthquakes and potential supervolcanic eruption, could, after all, turn into a catastrophe of truly Biblical proportions. SAR had been easy. But this situation had far more variables, none of the options seemed to be good or clear or workable, and in the end - if the thing really did blow - then this world would be more fucked than ever before in recorded human history. This was no situation for amateurs - or people with less than stellar skills.

  Jake had always been real good at planning. Sometimes the man’s mind had seemed so quick it left Charlie feeling a bit dizzy: identify the problem, analyze it, come up with a solution, then move - Bam, Bam, Bam, like an intellectual machine gun. There was somebody who could give him a plan.

  And wasn’t Jake’s uncle the Mayor of some rinky dink little town in Oregon? He pulled the phone out of his pocket and hit the speed dial, moving himself and his cart to the side so he didn’t become one of the assholes about whom he’d just been internally ranting. It answered on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Jake!”

  “Charlie?” His friend answered. He sounded a bit distracted. “What the Hell are you doing?”

  “Oh, you know . . . End of the world.”

  “There’s a lot of that going around.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In the true garden spot that is Winnemucca, Nevada. You?”

  “We’re actually about two and a half hours south of there.”

  “Cool deal,” Charlie said, smiling. “Hey listen . . . isn’t your uncle the Grand Imperial Poobah, or whatever of Bumfucked, Oregon?”

  “The word you’re looking for is Mayor. And yes, he is. Why?” Charlie could hear a tone of uncertainty in his friend’s voice.

  “That would make him the controlling civilian authority, wouldn’t it?”

  “I suppose,” Jake replied. “What the Hell’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you when you get here,” Charlie said, hanging up.

  Thirteen

  “I don’t know where I’m a-gonna go

  1

  When the volcano blows.”

  Harry Dailey/Jimmy Buffett

  Volcano

  1

  Yellowstone Volcano Observatory

  “Shall I tell you what’s going to happen?” Dr. Rick Golatta asked.

  “I really wish you wouldn’t,” Maggie replied.

  They’d moved a couple chairs out to the front of the Park Headquarters building. Dr. Morgenstern had gone inside to check the latest readouts, leaving the two of them alone out there.

  Dr. Golatta ignored her. “First, a single vent will blow, and we’ll have an eruption along the lines of Mt. Saint Helens,” he began. “My money’s on the Geyser Basin, but it could be more toward Yellowstone Lake. Care to place a bet?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “It’s not like the money in your pocket is going to do any good just sitting there.”

  What an asshole!

  “Never mind,” he said after a moment. “Not like it’s gonna do me much good, either.” He placed a hand on her good shoulder and gave her a mild shove. “Lighten up, Jones. We might as well enjoy ourselves. When life gives you lemons,” he said, “toss them in a glass and drown the suckers in Long Island Iced Tea, I always say.”

  She stared at him like he’d gone completely mental, but then the absurdity and hopelessness of their situation hit her, and, having no better response to it all, she began to laugh. Weeping certainly wouldn’t do any good. Crawling into a hole and hiding wouldn’t either. And God had already made His/Her decision. Life as they (and everybody else on the planet) knew it, would soon be over.

  So why not laugh?

  “That’s my girl,” he said, and then launched right back into the description she really didn’t want to hear.

  “But that first vent will just be the beginning. It’ll be like a tire with a slow leak. First time you hit a good bump: BOOM!”

  2

  Medford, Oregon

  “What the fuck were you thinking?” Bourassa stormed around the hotel suite, his flaring eyes darting from Jericho to the body of the dead girl on the bathroom floor. She couldn’t have been older than twenty - if that.

  “She was a sinner,” Jericho replied, simply, as if the answer was obvious.

  “Yeah?” Bourassa said, walking out into the suite. Jericho followed. “And now she’s a corpse we have to get rid of before the maid shows up.”

  Jericho waved the problem away with an indifferent backhanded swipe at the air as he walked to the wet bar and poured himself a drink. “Calm yourself, Brother David,” he said, filling his glass with bourbon. “This is the task God has set for us.”

  Brother David? Bourassa thought, struggling to quell the anger rising in his chest. He needed to think. He needed to act. He needed to control the situation. He needed to control Jericho, or everything would be lost. He took a deep breath to steady himself. And then another. And another. His fists clenched and unclenched. He looked at the body, then at Jericho.

  “Thomas,” he said, finally, in a calm and steady voice. “Your...” he paused, looking for the word. “...Mission is to rid the world of sinners, right?”

  “Right you are,” Jericho said, happily.

  The guy’s becoming unwrapped, Bourassa thought, but said: “And it’s God’s law you’re following, right?”

  “Two for two!”

  “But right now, in this world, we still have to follow the laws of Man, right?”

  Jericho paused, with his glass inches from his lips, and scowled. He looked ready to respond, but Bourassa didn’t give him time.

  “At least until God reveals Himself to the masses, and the Rapture can begin,” he said, pulling the idea straight out of his ass. This seemed to satisfy Jericho, who nodded after a moment and took a drink.

  “Since we still must follow the laws of Ma
n, and since the laws of Man forbid the act of murder...” Jericho opened his mouth to retort, but Bourassa stopped him like a traffic cop with a raised hand. “...or at least what they see as murder, then that sort of thing...” he jerked a thumb toward the bathroom where the corpse lay. “...must be done with discretion.”

  Jericho pondered this for a moment, then nodded.

  “Because if they think you’ve committed murder, they’ll throw you in prison, and your Mission will fail. And everything we’ve worked for all these years will fail right along with it.”

  Jericho slowly took another sip of his drink as he stared at Bourassa. His eyes wandered around the room, not seeming to focus on anything as he pondered what his Head of Security had just told him. Bourassa waited in silence, willing his partner in what used to be crime to pull his head out and stop being a fucking idiot. He seethed inwardly, but kept his expression mild, as if this was just another ordinary conversation, and not a debate on whether or not it was okay to kill a woman for giving a good blowjob.

  Finally, Jericho sighed, sat on one of the bar stools, took another sip of his drink, and nodded. “You’re right, of course, Brother David,” the man said. “We are here to do the Lord’s Good Work, but we must remember we are doing it in the world of Man.” He placed his glass on the bar and stood. “Render unto Caesar, Brother David. Render unto Caesar.” And so saying, he turned, pulled his black dress jacket off the back of the couch where it had lain, donned it, and left the suite, without another glance at the dead woman on the bathroom floor.

  Bourassa watched him leave, taking shallow breaths, trying to remain calm. As the outer door closed, he flipped it the finger and said: “Render this, motherfucker,” then turned toward the bathroom. He had work to do.

  3

  Carvers, Nevada

  Jake hung up his cell phone and stared at it, feeling an odd sort of synchronicity had just taken place. Charlie was exactly what he needed. Charlie would keep him grounded. Charlie, he could deal with. The women, on the other hand . . .

  “Are you okay?” Dani asked. They were the first words she’d spoken since . . . Jake looked at the bloody mess still on the ground at their feet.

  “Jake?” She asked again.

  He looked at her, and for the first time truly took in how roughed-up her face looked. The black and swollen eyes reminded him of something - some one - but he couldn’t quite grab the memory. And then he did: a Marine sergeant in the desert named Drummond, with a badly dislocated shoulder and one eye swollen shut.

  “Huh? Oh. Yeah. I’m fine,” he stammered, even more distracted than he had been, thanks to the juxtaposition of two black-eyed faces. The phone still lay nestled in his hand. The hand trembled slightly. Coming down from the adrenaline rush for the second time.

  She sidled up to him and took the arm that wasn’t holding the phone. “Thank you,” she said into his ear, and kissed him on the cheek.

  “For what?” He asked.

  “For saving me.”

  He pulled back and stared at her in wonder. “Saving you?” He asked, incredulous. “If anything, you saved me.”

  “I did?”

  “Absolutely,” he said, snapping out of it. “If you hadn’t...” He hesitated, instinctively feeling sure he shouldn’t make too fine a point about the knife she’d slammed into Perdue’s back. “...done what you did, then I’d have had to rush him. And then I’d have probably gotten shot.” Her eyes widened at the revelation. “He’d still be dead,” he assured her, “but I’d still have gotten shot. I’ve been shot before. Didn’t like it.”

  Another memory tried to jam its way into his consciousness, but he shoved it back down. “So I should be thanking you.” He kissed her gently on the side of her lips that wasn’t swollen. “And I do,” he added. “Thank you.”

  She just looked at him, a shy and unbelieving smile on her face.

  And then Mary, inside the motor home, yelled: “Jake! Get in here! I need you!”

  4

  Memorial Park

  Medford, Oregon

  Bobby Drummond looked down at the body of the nude woman. She’d been tied in a seated position to a lamppost in an out of the way corner of Memorial Park, near a copse of trees on the far side of where Reverend Fuckface had set his stage.

  After returning from the over and done with liquor store robbery, he’d hung around the dog and pony God Show for about an hour, until being informed his “services were no longer needed,” by a mean-looking son of a bitch, named Bourassa. He’d checked in with the station to confirm, and had been told this Bourassa character was, in fact, his point of contact with the Reverend’s people.

  That would have been good information to have when he’d started the duty, yesterday afternoon, but he supposed bureaucracy was the same everywhere: the person who most needed the information would receive it last. He hated bureaucracy, in all its forms, but that was about as useful as hating the wind. Like he’d often told his subordinates in the Corps: You ain’t gotta like it. You just gotta do it.

  So he’d left the park around nine. It was now ten-thirty, and a crowd had once again gathered on the already-trampled grass. The first one had been mostly made up of blue-collar white people, from what he could surmise from their dress and language and demeanor. There had been a smattering of Hispanics, a few Asians, a few Blacks, a few Natives, but most had been white. This crowd was entirely white, and male, and pissed off.

  The latter characteristic is what had caught his attention. He’d run a circuit through the park as part of his assigned patrol, had seen the crowd and got out to investigate. And then he saw the body.

  “Dispatch, Unit Twelve,” he’d said into his radio.

  “Dispatch,” came the reply.

  “Code one-eight-seven, southwest corner of Memorial Park.”

  There had been a hesitation, and then, “One-eight-seven?”

  One-eight-seven had been the code in LA County for homicide. Apparently, however, not in Medford, Oregon. Still, he didn’t want to broadcast that they had the dead body of a murdered white woman. The crowd was already large enough, and had already trampled any evidence beyond the detection capacity of an electron microscope. He’d moved them back to a radius of what looked like fifty feet, but the damage had already been done.

  “We have a D. B.,” he tried. He really needed to learn their codes, but there hadn’t been time.

  “Say again, Unit Twelve,” came the response.

  Fuck it, he said to himself, then: “Homicide, southwest corner Memorial Park. Request crime scene, and coroner.”

  Dispatch finally acknowledged the report, and Bobby turned to look at the body once more. The words WHITE BITCH were scrawled across her naked torso in what looked like indelible marker.

  He looked back toward the crowd. It was getting bigger, but its general color had not changed. He could hear the murmur of angry voices. An awful lot of the words they were using started with the letter “N.”

  What was it Conelly had said at the liquor store? Oh yes. Fuck me sideways.

  5

  NV 376

  North of Carvers, Nevada

  The SUV containing Jake, Mary, Dani and Miss Molly Noodle headed north, away from Carvers and all the dead bodies. Molly lay in the back seat with her head in Dani’s lap, as if sensing - as all good dogs do - the person who most needed comfort. Jake looked at them in the rear view mirror.

  The only light came from the glow of the dashboard, but he could still see the vacant expression on Dani’s face. What she’d been through must have been horrible. Understatement. That much would have been clear even without the fact that the other woman - the one who’d been tied to the bed in the back of that motor home - had died, shortly after going into the seizure that had made Mary call for his help. That could have been Dani’s fate, would have been Dani’s fate - that, or something even worse.

  He thought about the woman, whose name they didn’t know and would never know. She’d died frightened and alone.
He doubted she had even sensed Mary’s presence at the end, when the seizure turned her body into a thrashing pile of bones and nerve endings and battered flesh, jack-knifing wildly upon the blood-soaked mattress.

  The adrenaline crash, long-overdue, hit him like a kick in the gut. He yanked the truck to the side of the road, tugged open his seatbelt, shoved open the door and fell out onto the gravel shoulder, just as the contents of his stomach (mostly coffee) came spewing out. His everything hurt as the spasms turned to dry heaves, his pulse racing, his temples throbbing, his balls crawling up into the vacancy left by his heaving stomach.

  For once, the nightmare didn’t wait for him to fall asleep.

  6

  He lay with his back against the crumbled stone wall, the pain from the bullet wound in his shoulder throbbing with every beat of his heart, that was slowly pumping his life blood out through the hole. The last of the adrenaline he’d been feeding off of for the past six hours oozed out with it. He glanced to his right and saw the sergeant - Drummond - staring at him. . .

  “How ‘ya doin’, Jarhead?” He asked.

  The man looked like shit. One side of his face was a swollen mass of blood and bruise. He looked at Jake with his one good eye.

  “About the same as you, Puddle Pirate,” the man replied.

  An empty RPG tube lay beside Jake. He’d used it a few minutes before, sending its rocket toward a wall on the other side of the square, from which the Insurgents had been firing at them. The explosion had seemed muted, but that made sense, Jake thought, since his ears had been ringing from all the gunfire.

  The 9mm pistol sat in his right hand, the slides stuck back, empty. Drummond held a similar weapon, similarly empty.