by Clary, LeRoy
“Back-door,” sprang to mind. By identifying Sir Wilson’s back door, we found where his living quarters were. In an attack, he didn’t plan on hanging around. He’d head for the sailboats along with his most trusted supporters and sail away in the fastest boats around.
I said, “You believe one of those three smaller buildings near the other dock is his?”
Josh said, “Him and probably his two or three most trusted generals live there.”
Bailey said, “Agreed. We should think about a small group that has them as their only target. Sink or damage those sailboats so they can’t get away, too. Maybe five or ten people in rowboats that hug the shoreline and get close but stay out of sight until the actual attack. They go for the sailboats and block an escape.”
“How would a small group like that stop those boats?” I asked her.
She snorted softly and said, “I’d row right up to them and squirt barbecue lighter fluid all over the deck and toss a match. Or brandy, lamp oil, or cooking oil.”
I didn’t know if lighter fluid still existed, but there were plenty of flammable liquids down in Everett Sanctuary. Something similar could be located. It was a good idea.
We remained there for half the night, well after the moon rose. That was another consideration. We needed to find a schedule of the time the moon came out, but someone in the sanctuary would be able to tell us. What we had already found out was a good start but the more information we had, the better our chances.
I went with the others back to the entrance and watched them enter the dank water. I’d already told Josh and Bailey the plan as far as I knew, but it was time to leave and take care of personal business. If I failed or was killed, the plan would continue.
Ignoring the few objections, I turned away and slipped into the night and worked my way from deserted house to pile of rubble, then darted across empty streets. Near dawn, I was perched on an embankment overlooking what had been a parking lot and was now a familiar small sea of tents.
Even from a couple of hundred yards away, I picked out our tarp. Not only was it the cleanest with the least patches, but it was also strung right where we’d originally placed it.
Instead of rushing down to join Tess and Bream, I observed. Things were getting critical and a mistake could cost hundreds of lives. Hurrying caused mistakes.
Shortly after daylight, I noticed a pair of soldiers in the blue uniforms of Sir Wilson’s troops trying to walk casually through the camp. Not long after, there were four more. All seemed to be searching for something while trying to act relaxed as they strolled in and out of the tents and lean-tos.
There were other soldiers, as well, when I concentrated on locating men in blue. Maybe ten altogether, wandering in and around the people who were camped under the tents, tarps, and makeshift structures. They stopped and tried speaking to people. Most ignored them or shrugged their answers.
They were not liked.
It was not the time to go down there. I still had my binoculars and used them to search for Tess or Bream. Neither came into view despite the vantage that allowed me to watch most of the camp.
More soldiers arrived. I moved away and found other soldiers in small groups, so many that crossing any of the streets exposed me for too long. It hadn’t been that way before I’d been captured and taken down into the sanctuary. Something had changed.
There were soldiers from the camp working their way in my direction. To my right, down the street, were others, searching the buildings on both sides as they worked their way to me. Feeling squeezed, I looked left long enough to find another squad of ten. The only way our was behind, in the direction I’d arrived.
After withdrawing a hundred yards, I settled on hunkering down in the basement of a house that had burned. One section remained intact and allowed a good view of the surrounding area. While only a portion of two adjoining walls remained, they were all that stood upright for a couple of blocks in any direction.
I watched squads from three directions merge briefly, then spread out and move in my direction as a long line. I’d have to fall back more. They were closing a net on their search pattern. I got ready to sprint for the nearest trees.
A soft voice from a few feet to my side said, “Don’t turn around, son.”
I didn’t.
“What are you doing here? Give it to me straight.”
Telling the truth is sometimes easier than making things up. “Looking for friends but with all those soldiers out there, I just wanted to stay hidden. They’re coming this way.”
“They’re looking for a young man who was with a woman and a crazy.”
Tess and Bream—and me. No doubt. “Where are they? The woman and crazy?”
“You’re one of those three causing all the fuss? I thought so. Well, that Wilson ass-hole got two of them. Down at the old naval base, I think.”
“When?”
“A day ago. There’s a reward out for you, you know. Enough food for a year and then some. He must want you bad.”
I said nothing.
“Well?” He prompted as he jabbed my back with the barrel of what felt like a gun.
“I guess so.”
“What are you doing here that he wants you like that?”
“Kill him, if I get the chance.” The words were out of my mouth before thinking about them. After he killed everyone in the Three Hills Sanctuary and tried to find and kill everyone in Deep Hole, I had no sympathy. Yes, I’d kill him if given a chance.
The barrel of the gun was removed from my back. “Me too.”
I turned. An old man with a gray beard hanging to his chest was standing a shotgun against the basement wall. His back was to me. I still had my pink gun in my waistband.
“You’re not going anywhere until dark, tonight. Too many of them out there. Sit and tell me a story to keep my interest.”
“Who are you?”
“Most call me Coot. Not the only name I have used, but it works. Yours?”
“Danner.”
“That’s a last name. What’s your first?”
I paused. “It’s the only name I have. Danner.”
“You sick? Your skin is a little funny, sort of yellow and blotched. Not catchy, is it?”
“Tried to dye it with walnut juice.”
“Should have just got some sun a couple of times a day for two or three hours, at most.”
I said, none too gently, “We were in a hurry.”
“You from below, right?”
Now was the time to lie, if there was one. I started to shake my head, then relented and nodded.
He seemed satisfied. “Before that Sir Wilson pretender, there was another. Before him, it was a nasty woman. She was the worst of them. Must have killed half the survivors one way or another. Laughed as she did it. When this one’s gone, maybe a worse shit-head will take his place.”
“Maybe things will get better.”
He spat.
We had all day to sit and talk. He seemed willing to share what he knew. Despite Tess and Bream being captured, he might be the best thing to happen in a while.
I eased into the conversation as I steered it by saying, “There was a revolution down in a sanctuary. The people want to return to the surface.”
“They won’t find any friends up here.”
“Maybe. Or, maybe they will. Coming here with Sir Wilson as the local dictator isn’t going to work. He has already located one sanctuary and killed everyone there before stealing their guns and ammo.”
“Everyone heard about that.”
I gave it a while for him to think. Then, asked, “What would happen if a thousand people from below, all with new weapons and plenty of ammo attacked the navy base one night?”
Instead of answering right away, he gave it thought. He spat again, then said slowly, “If done right, they should take it over.”
I’d ask him about doing it “right” later. There was something else on his mind. I said, “Something about what I said is botherin
g you.”
“Yup. I want to know what comes next?”
I said, “I don’t understand the question.”
“Right now, we got ourselves this pompous ‘Sir Wilson’ who does about what he wants around here. But he keeps order, gives out enough dried fish for a person to live, and he’s strong enough to keep those others from north Seattle from coming up here and taking us all for slaves. So, if you kill off Sir Wilson and his followers, what comes next?”
“Coot, you are a genius.”
“Yup.”
“No, I mean it. All along, there has been something eating at me, and you just identified it. I believe we can defeat the navy station, but if we don’t have a plan for what comes after, why bother. The gangs down south will just rush in, take over, and things might be worse.”
“Yup.”
I turned to him. “What do you suggest, Coot?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Coot and I talked the entire day, mostly in staccato bursts like a machine gun firing off a few hundred rounds then taking time to reload and cool off. The conversation mostly centered on what comes next, as if the defeat of Sir Wilson’s stronghold was a foregone conclusion.
The problems were many. What it came down to is that we would have to control the population and keep order like a police force, provide food to supplement what little there was in winter, encourage local farmers to contribute or forcibly take what was needed for the city, all the while maintaining an army large enough to keep those city-states to the south at bay.
Which was precisely what Sir Wilson was already doing.
The old man with the gray beard was teaching me a thing or two, as he described it.
He let me do the talking—and make the mistakes. As I stumbled forward, his eyes twinkled and he directed more of the conversation than me, which was the opposite of what I’d intended.
He presented several good ideas, lots of questions, and before noon I had a far better understanding of the challenges ahead. For the rest of the afternoon, we ate stale peanuts from a jar, canned pears, and salted fish—provided by Sir Wilson, Coot told me.
We were in the half of a basement that had not collapsed, the old floor above us acting as a roof. The conversation was at a standstill and had been for some time when a few odd things stood out. There was food and water in jars, but only enough for a few days. No sleeping facilities.
Coot didn’t live there.
Coot was smart, insightful, and careful in what he said. While he often seemed to agree with something I said, by the end of the conversation, I’d often changed my position. He was clever and seemed to be enjoying himself at my expense.
My poker-senses said what he presented was wrong, yet I couldn’t see how. I had my back to a concrete wall, my mind flooded with what he’d shared, and little things like ants seemed to be attacking my mind. He was so good at shifting and directing the subject matter that it had taken most of the morning to catch on.
Now that I had, there were other things to think about.
My hand fell to my waist as I sat and hoped the action appeared normal and innocent. My fingers circled the butt as I pulled my knees up to conceal that I’d pulled the gun out, Coot closed his eyes as if preparing to take a nap.
He said, “Never got around to telling you my real name, did I?”
“No.” The question had come out of nowhere.
“People used to call me Will, when growing up. Short for Wilson.”
My gun came up and centered on his head, five feet away.
He didn’t flinch. “Not the Sir Wilson you’re looking for. His younger, prettier brother.”
Unbelievable. I’d spent the morning with the brother of the man I wanted to defeat. His shotgun was far off to his side. I could pull the trigger and end his life without a doubt. That made me question the thing.
I said, “Why?”
“We’ve already talked about some of it. He sent me here after our men captured your friends. We expected you to return here and shy away from the soldiers we sent, but like a funnel, you’d end up here. If it had been me, I’d realize the number of soldiers hunting me and find a place to hide for the day and move at night.”
“This old house was perfect.”
“I thought so,” he said, his eyes still looking straight ahead and not at me. “Why we did it, is a different question. My brother sent me here with hopes of finding and talking to you.”
“You could have just killed me when I got here,” I said.
“That would still leave thousands of well-armed people ready to swarm out of their anthills whenever they want. Nobody knows how many.”
I gave that some thought. While Sir Wilson ruled Everett and the area around it, that rulership could end at any time the sanctuary sent its people above ground. Just like the plan I’d discussed with Coot.
It didn’t make sense that he’s listened—and even improved the plans to attack his brother.
I still looked at him through the sights of the nine-millimeter semi-automatic. He ignored me and said nothing, waiting for me to figure it out.
“I don’t get it,” I admitted.
“Look up. Near the top of the wall.”
A rifle barrel wagged to draw my attention near the chimney. Another was on the other side. I looked back at Coot, expecting to find a smile of accomplishment. After all, I’d told him our entire plan to defeat his brother.
He was not smiling.
I still had him centered in my sights. That didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. He said, “There are at least fifty of our best men surrounding this house.”
“I can still kill you before they can kill me.”
“You could. Or, you could listen to a proposition I have for you and your friends, not just the three we are holding, but all of you who are living below ground. There may be a way out of this for all of us.”
“I’ve already seen what you think of us at a sanctuary we call Three Hills.”
He pursed his lips. “That was my doing. Not my brother. And I’m sorry for it.”
I kept my gun on him, my finger on the trigger. As if by its own accord, it tightened.
Coot said, “There are always two sides to a story. In that case, those idiots who lived below kept sneaking outside and killing innocent people. We caught a few but they refused to let us talk to their leaders. Their attacks continued for three years, killing nearby farmers and soldiers we’d left to contain them, and anyone else they found.”
“People from the sanctuary?”
“They were vicious animals who gave us little choice. With their quality weapons, they snuck outside a dozen at a time, shooting anything that moved with silenced rifles that made no flash so we didn’t even know when they killed. Men, women, kids, livestock, soldiers. They didn’t just kill, they slaughtered. We tried to initiate talks, to explain they didn’t have to do what they did.”
“So, you killed all of them!”
He turned his head to me. His eyes were wet. “No, we didn’t. Not directly. To protect the locals and ourselves in case they came out in numbers because we had no idea of how many lived down there, we began tunneling into the damned place. Months to get past the first door, and the same for the second.”
“And then you killed them all.”
His eyes flashed. “I said, we didn’t do it. Listen to me, boy. When we got through the third door, they were dead. All of them. Probably a hundred, at least. Had been dead for weeks. Those that remained down there knew we were coming, heard us blasting and chiseling, and they killed themselves. Looked like a few had shot the rest, then each other.”
I said nothing but still blamed him.
Coot’s voice lowered. “There had been a few hundred of them down there at one time. There were far less than two hundred when we entered, all dead, but my point is that we didn’t know that. There could have been twenty-thousand. We had to get in there and talk some sense into them.”
It sounded reasonable. I waited.
He said, “If we had known there were that few, and that they were dying off, we could have caved in the side of the mountain and sealed them inside.”
“And you couldn’t leave potentially twenty-thousand enemies in your backyard who might appear at any time.” There, I’d said it for him.
“We had already captured one of them and kept him in a cell while interrogating him. He threatened us with the information that there are at least four more underground locations near here, and some are huge. His word, not mine. So, we still have essentially the same problem, and that problem is you and your underground friends.”
So far, I couldn’t disagree with him about anything. I glanced at my hands and found the barrel of my gun had lowered until it pointed at a place between us. I turned my attention up and located four guns pointed at me—but none were advancing.
Coot sat and waited for me to assimilate all we’d talked about.
I finally said, “You set this whole thing up just so you could sit and talk to me. Your troops surrounded the area and closed in, almost forcing me to shelter here. You must have a plan of some sort or are you’d have just shot me.”
“True. A compromise, of sorts. You’re a smart cookie and that’s good for both of us. If you will listen with an open mind, we might end this peacefully.”
“Easy to say with all those guns protecting you.”
“So, it’s trust you want? Okay.” He stood and called out, “All of you, head back to the base and tell my brother I’ll be along later.”
“We can’t leave you here while a gun is pointed at you, sir.” The voice had the ring of authority to it.
Coot reached out to his shotgun and swung barrel in my direction while saying softly, “Stay calm, Danner.” His finger never came near the trigger or I’d have shot him. Then he called out again, “Okay, he is now my prisoner. Head back.”
Men started moving.