Luke limped after them as armed men in faded US army fatigues began to appear from the long brush between the Toyota lot and the onramp to the 101.
“Everyone down on the ground!” someone ordered.
Luke ignored them and kept running. His thigh burned like hell, but he only stopped when, as he drew near, Jarryd jammed the gun even harder into Diana’s chin.
“Not another step, you fucker!”
Luke held up his arms.
“Okay. Okay! I’m not armed. Just let her go, please.”
“Oh sure, since you asked so sweetly.”
He turned the gun on Luke and smiled crazily.
“Nice knowing you, asshole.”
Diana smacked his hand away and the shot went wild. Jarryd still had a grip on her until she kicked backwards, hard like a mule, between his legs. It wasn’t a completely accurate blow, but strong enough that he doubled over. She slipped out of his grip and ran towards Luke. Luke ran to meet her, his arms open.
Jarryd’s shot was like a starter’s gun going off. Diana stumbled forward, a look of agony painted across her face. Luke caught her, and they fell to the ground.
There was a gunshot behind them and Jarryd, already running away, jerked as a bullet struck him in the upper arm. It almost knocked him off balance. Almost. He changed direction 90 degrees and plunged into the thick brush that lined the other side of the driveway.
Luke held Diana.
“He shot me,” she said, in a calm voice.
“You’ll be okay,” said Luke, his voice thick.
“How’s your leg?”
He glanced at his bloodstained thigh.
Wow, that’s a lot of blood.
It pooled in the wound and dripped down onto the concrete. He looked down at her pale face.
“It’s okay.”
“I don’t know if I believe you. You look awful pale.”
“So do you…”
Suddenly there were people around them.
“Stretcher!” Someone close by called. “Make that two!”
Motes swam in Luke’s eyes as someone knelt beside him. A familiar face filled his vision.
“Hey buddy,” said Isaac, as his eyes filled with tears. “Good to see you…”
“Isaac?” Luke said, smiling and squeezing the warm hand that had found his. “Why are you crying? It’s only a leg wound…”
He saw his friend’s mouth working. The only word he heard was ‘happy’. Then someone turned out the lights.
38
Jarryd stopped running after about two miles. He collapsed to the ground, his chest heaving. His bleeding arm stung cruelly and he pulled the sleeve of his habit up to reveal the bullet wound. It had gone right through fleshy part his forearm, miraculously missing bone, but bleeding quite heavily.
He looked back the way he had come. They didn’t appear to be following any more, God be praised. He slipped into an abandoned gas station and headed to the back, scanning the almost bare shelves as he went looking for something he could use a bandage.
After a short search he found a clear plastic pack of handkerchiefs on the floor. It would have to do. Ten minutes later he was walking again, a plastic bottle of green tinged water from the toilet of the gas station in his pocket next to the revolver.
He walked and passed the time by formulating his story. He would return a hero and put this whole sordid mess behind him. He did worry that there might be survivors amongst his comrades, but surely none of them would be allowed to return home.
The question of who the armed interlopers were, could wait until he was safely home.
***
The bumps and noise of an engine woke Luke. He opened his eyes. He was on his back in the open tray of a vehicle. Soft white clouds were scattered here and there on the sky overhead, like fluffy sheep on a brilliant field of blue. He felt a little disoriented.
“He’s awake,” said someone.
He started to sit up and a hand against his chest pushed him back down gently.
“Don’t try to sit up just yet,” said Isaac, putting a water bottle to his lips. “They patched you up and gave you some morphine for the pain. You might feel a little bit out of it.”
He nodded and swallowed some water. It was cool and fresh.
“Diana?”
“The doc says she’s going to be okay. She’s in the other truck. She was shot her in the back, above the kidney but he thinks it missed all her major organs. He’s going to take the bullet out when we get back to Concord. She’ll be sick and sorry for a while though.”
“Did you get him?”
Isaac knew who Luke meant. He shook his head.
“No,” he said over the noise of the engine. “They looked for twenty minutes, but then Bowman called it. Randall’s orders were clear, extraction only.”
Luke, hiding his disappointment, nodded.
“So Jacob found you? Is he okay?”
“He’s fine. He didn’t find us, one of the Colonel’s patrols found him and sent for me. Looks like we made it in a nick of time.”
“You did,” Luke’s eyes were heavy from the morphine and he closed his eyes again.
When he awoke next he was being carried on a stretcher up the path towards the steps that led into Randall’s headquarters. He tilted his head up. Isaac was holding that end of the stretcher, a sheen of sweat on his brow.
“Dude, I think I can walk. Set me down.”
“No, it’s okay. It’s just a little way now.”
Luke took the decision out of his hands and swung his legs over the side of the stretcher, almost falling out as Isaac and his partner tried to right it.
“Fine, fine. Hang on.”
Luke maintained a crooked smile as he put his feet down, even as his leg shrieked in protest. Isaac and the soldier lowered the stretcher as he stood upright. He allowed Isaac to put a shoulder under his arm and help him walk up the steps. The soldier folded up the canvas stretcher and followed them.
“I did that for you, you know?” he said to Isaac.
“Oh really?”
“Yeah, you looked like you were going to drop your end at any second.”
“Gee, I’ve missed you,” Isaac said, smiling playfully as they lumbered up the steps.
“Why are we here?”
“They’ve got better medical facilities than us. Your friend Diana has already gone in. They left men to watch over the rest of the people you brought and trucks are already on the way to bring them in. We’ll go home to Manchester tomorrow… if you want to, that is.”
Luke looked at his friend.
“I do man.”
Randall and Bowman were waiting at the top of the steps. They greeted Luke, Randall patting him on the shoulder.
“Good to see you’re still in one piece, son.”
“Thanks to you guys,” said Luke, nodding at Bowman.
They stepped across the threshold and as his eyes adjusted to the light inside the building, he spied two more familiar faces.
Before he could even say hello, a teary-eyed Indigo rushed forward, almost knocking him down as she gripped him in a bear hug. He hugged her back, and looking over her shoulder, his gaze fell on Ben. His English friend was behind Indigo and he was walking slowly towards them, a small package in his arms. He also had tears streaming down his face. Luke was about to tease him when he realized it wasn’t a package.
It was a bundle.
A squirming bundle in a pink blanket.
Indigo slipped out of his arms, now crying in earnest.
Luke sobbed, as realization crashed down on him. He shook his head.
Ben nodded.
Another sob wracked Luke and he fell to his knees looking skyward.
“No,” he whispered.
Ben stopped in front of him.
“Yes,” he said softly and held out the bundle to his friend.
Luke lowered his gaze to the opening in the top of the blanket. The most beautiful pair of blue eyes looked up curiously at him.
“Luke, meet your daughter, Erin,” Ben said, his voice cracking with emotion.
Weeping softly, Luke put out his arms uncertainly as Ben lowered his baby daughter into them. She was perfect. Perfect features. Perfect complexion. Perfect soft, downy hair. He cuddled her to him as Isaac and Indigo joined Ben in front of him.
“She’s beautiful, just like Brooke,” said Luke, laughing and crying as tears of joy spilled over his cheeks.
They cried and laughed with him.
Somehow, after feeling so wrong for so long, everything felt right again.
39
Jarryd crossed back into Maine two days after the battle at the junction. He was hungry and tired, but in good shape considering the skin around the wound on his arm was pink and inflamed. He’d be home in another four hours or so.
As he walked along the leaf covered road, the forest thick around and overhead, he allowed himself to think about how he would persuade the Council to allow him to take a force, a much bigger force, to find the handless criminal and bring him back alive to face his crucifixion.
He smiled a thin, mirthless smile. If the woman Diana wasn’t dead already, he thought he might just cut her to pieces and feed her to the bastard before bringing him back.
Jarryd didn’t see the animal resting in the leaves by the side of the road until he was only a few feet away. Its tawny fur was almost perfect camouflage in that light and against the golden carpet of Maple leaves.
He stopped.
It took a few seconds for his brain to process what he was seeing. Then fear kicked in. Barely daring to breathe, he slowly lowered his hand towards the pocket of his habit. The lion stood.
“Nice kittycat,” he said as his fingers closed over the revolver.
The lion took an uncertain step towards him and sniffed the air. Jarryd took a step back. The lion took another forward. Jarryd made his final mistake. He turned and ran, trying to pull the revolver out as he went. It was tangled in the material and he finally pulled it free with a yell of triumph.
Then the freight train hit him.
Claws. Teeth. Ripping. Shredding.
Death.
EPILOGUE
Rochester, NY.
The tall blonde man with the crooked nose watched silently through the one-way glass. The naked man strapped to the chair in the adjoining room gargled in pain as the interrogator pulled another tooth from his jaw with a vicious wrench of his arm.
“Where are you from!” he screamed into the moaning man’s face.
The man in the chair closed his eyes and shook his head, the blood from his mouth dribbling down his chin and onto his chest. He had been captured the day before. The other three in his company had been killed. One woman and two men. They had been well-armed, wearing US army fatigues and in possession of a working Jeep.
A platoon had stumbled upon them while driving back from a freshly captured settlement in Albany near to the border with Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In the ensuing fight, the interlopers had killed two of his soldiers and wounded three others before they were put down.
Worryingly, they had been well within the borders, in fact only a 15 miles out from Rochester.
The blonde man lost patience. He stalked to the microphone and grabbed it.
“Enough with the gentle stuff, get it done.”
The interrogator looked at the mirror glass.
“Yes, Sir.”
He dropped the tooth on the floor and stepped up to the chair with his pliers open. The man in the chair’s eyes opened again when he felt the cold jaws of the pliers close one of his testicles.
“Please, no…”
The interrogator’s arm tensed as he squeezed. The man screamed.
“Where are you from?”
“I’ll tell you! Please! Stop!”
The jaws of the pliers opened slightly, and the man slumped in his chair.
“Where?”
“Concord. In New Hampshire,” he said in a shuddering, exhausted voice.
“How many of you are there?”
The man shook his head again, tears and sweat streaming down his face. The pliers squeezed harder this time. He screamed louder.
“I’ll tell you everything. Stop!”
“Last warning. The next time you refuse me, I’ll pop it like a grape, understand? How many?”
An exhausted nod.
“Roughly five hundred…”
Ten minutes later, they had all the information they were going to get. It was enough. The group in Concord were large and well-equipped and had military personnel amongst them. That, and the fact they had sent a team to gather intel on them, meant they were a real and immediate threat.
The blonde man whose name was William, and who had once helped trap unsuspecting survivors for the Chinese, spoke into the mike again.
“Kill him.”
He lingered to watch the coup de grace, a thoughtful look on his face, then headed for the door.
It was time to speak to the president.
End of Episode 5
America Falls continues in Episode 6 – Civil War – it will be available 30 August 2018, you can sign up to be notified at scottmedbury.com
A QUICK NOTE
Thank you for reading along this far with me. Writing America Falls has taken me a little way away from the battle that’s raging between left and right on the political and social scene. For that I’m grateful. Someone asked me the other night, ‘do you ever remember it being so vicious?’ I don’t, and to be honest, it’s scary.
I’m not going to tell you my politics or give you my opinion, too many people who are supposed to be entertaining us do just that. But, I do hope my books offer you some escape from it all and with the help of Isaac, Luke and co, help to remind you what’s great about the country you live in.
Scott Medbury, June 2018
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