But there was still Sofia. He had to get her away from here and the agents as soon as he could. The need for haste helped, hurrying him through the awful business of collecting the bodies of his family and carrying them inside so that he might escape with all that remained for him in the world. With Sofia.
The silent farmhouse sat nestled at the edge of a thick glade of myrtle and basswood trees on the southern foot of a small rise overlooking his fields of lima and pole beans. A whitewashed two-story wood-framed house with deep verandas around three sides, it had been crowded with all his relatives crammed inside, but Mariela had insisted on keeping everyone together. He chose not to dwell on the bitter irony of that as he carried the last of his extended family into the parlor.
He could not bear to stand and look at them, even shrouded as they were, for more than a few moments. It was not just that he could feel his heart seizing up painfully; there seemed a good chance that he might go mad if he gave in to the urge to lie down among them and give up. Instead he forced himself to make the sign of the cross before backing out of the room and closing the door. He would never set foot in there again. Instead, he trudged upstairs, where he could hear his daughter still crying.
The door to her bedroom was closed, the room she had shared with her little sister Maya. He hesitated outside for a moment before pressing on to the master bedroom. Everywhere he saw evidence of violation: drawers pulled out and the contents emptied, clothes on the floor, toys scattered around, a chair knocked over and left lying halfway out the door. On a normal day Mariela would never have allowed such chaos in her domain.
He clenched his jaw, tasting his own blood, and hurried into the bedroom, quickly stuffing spare Levi’s and shirts and two pairs of boots into a sports bag. He dug an army surplus arctic-rated sleeping bag out of the bottom of the closet and a thick lamb’s wool coat. There would be nights when they would not be able to find shelter, and the chill of the deserts and badlands after dark was enough to finish off the unwary. Although he would doubtless be able to scavenge much of what they needed on the trail, there was no point leaving things to chance at this early stage. The main thing right now was to get the hell away from Blackstone’s territory with Sofia, to seek out help wherever he could.
He knew he was alone among his neighbors in believing the road agents to be tools of Jackson Blackstone, but Miguel had invested a good deal of time, before arriving here, consulting much more widely than the “experts” on offers to prospective settlers. He had sought out a number of Mexican sources, vaqueros like himself, some of them settlers, some bandits working the border regions. To them there was no question. The agents did the bidding of Fort Hood.
Miguel was about to leave when his eye fell upon a small silver-framed photograph of Mariela and the children resting on an old mahogany chest in which all the drawers stood open. Hesitating momentarily, he finally picked it up and carefully removed the picture from the frame. His hands were shaking but he allowed himself a few seconds of indulgence, gazing at his family as they had been just a few short hours ago. He struggled with the enormity of it all. That happy time was now as distant and impossible to touch as the surface of a cold star twinkling in the night sky. How could there be so much life in his gnarled brown fingers as they stroked the image of his beautiful wife and children when they were all gone now.
Miguel stuffed the picture into his wallet before his emotions could boil up again and unman him.
He padded softly out of the room with his bag, painfully aware he would never set foot in there again. The vaquero paused outside his daughter’s room, listening to her wretched, strangled sobs. He knocked lightly and entered, not waiting for a reply. Sofia lay on her side with her knees drawn up under her chin, shivering violently, crying, and hugging a small stuffed bear she had carried with her from the day she had found it on the Aussie Rules. Aware that every moment’s delay put her in danger, he nonetheless approached quietly and cautiously, easing himself down on the mattress beside her. She jerked away from him, her tear-reddened eyes wide with fear. Miguel tried to brush her long hair away from her face, but she flinched.
“Easy, Sofia. Easy. I know it is hard,” he said softly, “but we must go. Now. The men who did this will be back, and if they catch us here, I cannot protect you.”
She drew in a shallow hitching breath and tried to speak but was unable to form any words at first. Miguel was worried by the violence of the tremors racking her slim body. He glanced briefly out her window, which overlooked the area in front of the house, including the driveway winding up toward the main road. How long would it be before the road agents returned?
“I am sorry, but we must go; we have to get you away from here, Sofia. We have to go now if you are to live.”
“I … I d-don’t want to l-live,” she cried pitiably.
Another glance out the window.
Nothing yet.
He took a moment to lay down beside her and fold her into a hug. She did not resist, although she was shaking so hard, he wondered whether she would have been able to anyway. Miguel tried to speak, but his throat was tight with grief, forcing him to push his feelings down tight. When he knew he could talk without falling apart, he spoke quietly into her ear.
“Crying is good; you must cry for all of them. But we must go, too, Sofia. Your mother, your brother and sister, all of your uncles and aunts, they will haunt me if I do not get you safely away before those men come back. And they will come back, Sofia. Very soon. So we must go.”
He kissed her head, which felt hot with fever, and rubbed his callused hands gently on her upper arms as he spoke. Slowly the tremors that shook her body trailed off and the awful, gut-wrenching tenor of her cries became less like the sounds of an animal and more like the bawling of a little girl to whom something bad had happened, something very very bad. When Miguel judged her sufficiently in control of herself again, he eased up, pulling her with him.
“Come on, then, come with Papa,” he said softly. “You can bring your bear and a few personal things, small things like photographs, but you must gather them quickly and keep them all in one bag. Pack some clothes for traveling, for trail riding, warm clothes. And be quick, Sofia. Those men will be back for their friends soon, and we will give them nothing. Nothing, do you understand?”
She sniffed and nodded uncertainly.
“Do we have time to bury them? To say prayers?”
He shook his head firmly.
“No. We must be gone, but we will not leave this house to the agents, and we will leave no one to the dogs or the wolves.”
She nodded shakily and tottered over to her dresser drawer on stiff unsteady legs. When he judged her sufficiently composed, he left the room and hurried downstairs, where he tossed the bags and heavy jacket onto the kitchen table. He fetched a couple of saddlebags from the utility room at the rear of the house in order to pack them with trail food. Rice, beans, dried meat, sugar, coffee, and a bottle of vitamins. Mariela had baked biscuits that morning, and the rich, malty smell of them was still thick in the kitchen. He found a jar of cookies in the pantry and wrapped a few in an old tea towel. They would do for a quick meal this morning, and he felt it important not to leave them behind.
Finally he unlocked the cupboard under the main staircase and flicked on the bare lightbulb inside. Using a key on a separate ring hanging from his belt, Miguel opened a small gun cabinet he had fixed to the rear wall. He took out his favorite rifle, a Winchester Model 1894 Lever Action 30.30, and his saddle gun, a double-barreled Sicilian-style Lupara. He then grabbed six boxes of ammunition for the long arm and two boxes of shells for the sawed-off shotgun. He threaded a heavy clublike Maglite torch through one of the big steel key rings on his belt. Sofia had already collected her hunting rifle and the ammunition for it. He was not keen on her carrying the Remington on a regular basis, although if she had had it with her this morning …
Stop it, he told himself as he tried to figure out what other weapon to get for his chil
d. Neither of them was a soldier and he didn’t want to be loaded down with a lot of useless ironmongery. As it was, they simply couldn’t carry enough weapons to fight off more than a very small band of road agents.
He grunted and decided that the Remington would have to do.
Shuttling all the supplies out to the horses required four trips, with Sofia joining him on the last run. He was glad to see she had changed her clothes and carried her personal belongings in a small backpack with the head of her teddy bear sticking out of the top. She remained subdued, and he could tell from the furtive way in which her eyes sometimes darted here and there that she was wondering where he had laid out the bodies. Miguel did not want her dwelling on such things. He gave her a bag of beans to carry out to the horses and told her to transfer the rifle he had ridden out with this morning to her own mount.
“For the next few weeks we must always be armed,” he said. “Both of us. Until we get somewhere safe.”
“Are we going to Corpus Christi?” she asked in a small voice. “Wouldn’t they expect us to go that way?”
The sky had grown dark with gathering storm clouds. Lightning strikes crackled over the hills to the southwest, and a few drops of icy rain splashed Miguel’s face as he looked up.
“Yes,” he said. “I do not think we can go south. They probably would expect that. We would have to pass through Blackstone territory, and his men would make it difficult for us. We shall ride north, to Kansas City. The federales are strong there. We need to tell them what has happened. They will do something.”
Sofia said nothing. He wondered how much she knew of the political situation in Fort Hood, of the standoff between the Federal Mandate and Governor Blackstone’s regime. It was not something the adults had discussed in front of the children. The horses twitched their ears and shivered while he loaded them with supplies and allowed them to drink from the trough lying in the shade on the eastern side of the house. Miguel did not let himself dwell on the moment that was coming, the abandonment of the ranch that had been the best hope for his family.
He remembered the day they arrived in a salvaged school bus loaded down with supplies from Corpus Christi. A civilian from the Federal Mandate had helped them get settled in, logging their location on a laptop and taking a few pictures of the family. It had been difficult, getting the children to settle down long enough to gather for a photograph. The men had inventoried the salvageable equipment and the structures for the government man while Mariela and the women put out the best spread they could manage. Everyone sat around a cobbled-together table, sampling freshly butchered and roasted beef while enjoying bottles of a New Zealand red wine they had brought with them.
After dinner Mariela was waiting for him in their bedroom, her skin glowing under the candlelight. She held out her hand …
Miguel shook the past away. He took a deep breath and held it for a second lest his self-control finally fail.
He could not afford to think about this, to let go of hope entirely. He had to look to the future, to Sofia.
The dogs were still barking, and he again asked Sofia to ride over to the barn to release them. “They will be upset,” he said.
She nodded, her face a dull mask as she placed one boot in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle.
“Good. If the men come back, you must ride out immediately. Head into the forest. They won’t be able to follow you in there, not in vehicles. You know the clearing? In the middle of the forest? You wait for me there at the northeast corner.”
He considered telling her to make for the militia post at College Station if he didn’t turn up, but she was fragile enough as it was. He did not think his daughter would cope with the prospect of something happening to him while she rode away. Miguel checked that she had transferred the rifle to her mount then waved her off.
He flicked his eyes down to the main road, past the bodies of the road agents, which he had not bothered to move. A pair of black crows, their oily feathers glistening with raindrops, pecked at the wounds of one of the dead men, pausing momentarily as Sofia’s horse approached. Miguel watched her stiffen in the saddle as she rode past them with her head turned away. He ducked back inside for just a moment, bending down to open the bottom drawer in the kitchen, from which he removed a small sheaf of papers in a plastic Ziploc bag. His settlement documents, proof that the government in Seattle had chosen his family to run this farm as part of the reconstruction program. He tucked them away inside his jacket, then pushed a light straw Stetson down on his head and donned a pair of wraparound sunglasses. From the cupboard under the sink he fetched a one-gallon drum of lamp oil, unscrewed the cap, and splashed the contents all over the kitchen.
For a few seconds he hovered on the edge of indecision, unable to do what he had to. But the barking of the dogs reached him, telling him Sofia was releasing them from the barn. With his face contorted into a rictus of loathing, he struck a match and tossed it on to the nearest patch of oil, which ignited with a whoomp. He stalked out of the house without a backward glance.
8
Wiltshire, England
The ambush was a simple affair, two cars in a herringbone formation blocking Stock Lane, just before the T-intersection with Hilldrop Lane about three klicks outside Aldbourne. Bret spotted it as he crested a rise about five hundred yards short of the trap. Somebody without his experience, a local farmer, say, probably would have ridden right into it, assuming a breakdown or even a small crash had blocked the road. But Bret Melton had been through enough military checkpoints to recognize the unmistakable arrangement of vehicles. In fact, the very presence of two cars was enough to give him pause. Very few people had the resources for private automobile travel anymore. He squeezed the hand brake on the mountain bike as he reached the summit of the hill, very much aware of the baby’s presence in a carrier on his back.
“What the fuck?” he muttered before admonishing himself quietly. He was trying not to swear in front of Monique. She wouldn’t understand yet, but it was a bad habit he had to give up. He felt her shift in the backpack as he squinted at the cars. There appeared to be four, no, five men down there. Two white and three dark-skinned, probably of West Indian origin. There weren’t many from the subcontinent free to wander the British Isles anymore. They appeared to be inspecting the engine of one car. The hood was up and three of the men were bent over it, but that made him even more suspicious. The car was a late-model BMW by the look of it, and on the rare occasions that they broke down, there was very little you could do if you didn’t have access to a full suite of computerized diagnostic tools in a licensed repair facility. The baby cried out loudly, and a pulse began to beat in Bret’s temple. This just felt wrong.
The men were looking at him now, pointing. One of them waved, gesturing for him to pedal down to them, as though some passing cyclist might be able to help fix their high-tech sedan. Melton checked his watch. He was due in Swindon in about ninety minutes for the meeting with the Resources Ministry guys. He wouldn’t be missed back at the farm for hours yet. He shook his head. Something felt very wrong about this.
He stood up and pressed down on the pedals as if to trundle down the hill to them but instead turned the bike around and pushed off in the direction of home. A few seconds later the sound of slamming doors and engines firing up drifted over the rise. Damn. There was no way he could outrun these guys. They’d be on him in moments. He skidded the bike to a halt, dismounted quickly, and carried it over to the drystone wall that ran alongside the country road. He flung the bike over without any concern about damaging it, then scrambled over, taking considerably more care not to jostle the baby. He ducked down behind the wall as the first car, the BMW with supposed engine trouble, came roaring over the crest.
He dared not risk raising his head for a look as the cars rushed by. Monique was fully awake now and crying loudly. They wouldn’t hear her over the noise of their engines, but if the men stopped the cars and climbed out, as surely they must in the next few minutes, the
baby would give away their position. He looked around desperately. A two-hundred-yard dash would carry him to the far side of the field and another drystone wall. A few trees stood in the northwest corner of this field, and another clump had been allowed to grow up a few hundred yards farther on in the next field beyond, a roughly rectangular paddock waving with what looked like a barley crop.
Bret didn’t debate his next move. He checked that the papoose was securely fixed, then took off at a sprint, bent low, making for the far side of the field. The ground was uneven, recently plowed, and he had to watch his footing lest he turn or even break an ankle. When he was halfway across, he heard the cars returning.
They screeched to a halt just as he made the barrier of the ancient rock wall. Taking it in one leap, he flinched and ducked instinctively as a single shot rang out behind him. He heard voices calling out for him to stop, but they simply spurred him on. If he could just make the next field, he might be able to disappear into the gently swaying sea of grain. Beyond that lay a remnant strip of forest, and from there it was a short, hard dash to the village of Aldbourne and the Home Guard office at the corner of Castle and Malborough. His cardio fitness was not great, not compared with what it had been when he was a ranger or even a correspondent. But he was pretty certain he could outrun the city boys behind him.
For the briefest moment he wondered what the hell they wanted with him and his daughter, but the question answered itself. It probably had nothing to do with either of them. This would be about Caitlin. As soon as he thought of his wife, more guns opened up. He dared not risk even a glance behind as he sprinted toward the wall, attempting to maintain an even, loping stride so as not to shake the baby too much. She was screaming now, a full-throated caterwauling wail.
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