by Jeff Gunhus
Not only that, but he hated to hear optimism in the middle of an operation. It led to complacency, and complacency led to mistakes. Everything about Estevez’s body language indicated he expected a pat on the head for a job well done. Like hell.
“Don’t get cocky, son. A lot can happen between here and getting underground,” Keefer said, pleased to see the younger man wipe the smile off his face. “What’s been done with the sheriff and the woman Morris wanted us to save? Are they still in the jail?”
Estevez looked uncomfortable at the question. “I … I have my man Jacobs taking care of them.”
Keefer interpreted the young man’s unease as just his contempt for Keefer worrying about such ancillary concerns during the op. What the man didn’t know was that Keefer agreed with him.
“You were right. They’re both a needless complication.”
Estevez looked off-balance. “What do you want done with them?”
“Have your man kill them,” Keefer said. “Morris doesn’t need to be coddled like a child. They weren’t part of the plan, so let’s remove them.”
A flash of surprise crossed Estevez’s face, and then it was gone. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll get it done.”
“Good,” Keefer said as his command truck pulled up and came to a stop in front of him. “Now let’s get the hell up this mountain.”
He climbed into his truck and indicated for the driver to head out. As they left the town, the AAVs churned their tracks on the gravel roads, heading up to the mine that had given the town its birth.
And which was now to be the site of its death.
36
“What are we going to do?” Cassie asked.
Rick watched the AAVs start to roll out of town. Jacobs sat in the corner of the second-floor storage room where they were hiding out. He was bound, gagged and unconscious, but Rick watched him closely. If Jacobs came around, he was prepared to choke him out again. The last thing they needed was their prisoner making any noise while the place was crawling with soldiers. Once the town cleared, he was looking forward to asking Jacobs some questions. Rick had some experience getting answers from people, and he was looking forward to using some of those techniques. He was in the mood to make someone pay for what was going on outside. He wished he had Keefer tied up in front of him, but Jacobs was going to have to do for now.
Still, he worried that Jacobs would be missed and a search for him launched. While the operation outside was efficient, the imperative was obviously on speed. He hoped one soldier would somehow be lost in the shuffle.
The test came sooner that he thought. Through the window he saw Estevez stride toward the jail along with four men, including the soldier with the tattoo covering his face. Rick crossed the room and dragged Jacobs behind a row of boxes, indicating to Cassie to stay with him.
“Stay here,” he whispered. “If he starts to wake up, signal me.”
Cassie crouched on the floor next to the man’s head. “What happens if they come up here?”
Rick shook his head. If the men came up, they were finished. Even if Rick picked a couple of them off, the noise would attract more soldiers. Once that happened, they were as good as dead.
The wooden structure shuddered as the door downstairs was opened and then slammed shut.
“Jacobs,” Estevez called out. “Time to go.”
Rick slid on his belly across the floor to the door leading downstairs, distributing his weight so the floor didn’t creak. Even so, it shifted a little, the tiny noise making Rick freeze. The men were so loud downstairs that he doubted they heard anything. He quickly slid the rest of the way and leaned close to the door to listen. It was opened a couple of inches so he could hear them well enough.
“Jacobs!” Estevez called out.
There was another shift in the old building as the door to the jail cells was thrown open. The voices were muffled now, but he could make out the gist of what they were saying.
“Not here …”
“… last cell … isn’t even …”
“… take these assholes … in the trailer …”
He looked over to Cassie who peeked up over the boxes at him. She frantically waved her hands as if she’d been trying to get his attention. Once she had it, she pointed down toward Jacobs. Rick couldn’t see the man, but the message was clear. He was coming around.
“Want me to go find him?” one of the soldiers downstairs said. Rick thought he recognized the voice. The man with the face tattoo.
Rick stiffened. They were back in the main room. He could hear sliding sounds across the floor and he guessed the other soldiers were dragging the bodies out from the first cell. If Jacobs came to, it’d be easy for him to make enough noise to get noticed.
“No time. Besides, believe it or not, Keefer came around and decided those two were a liability. Doesn’t matter anymore where Jacobs put the bodies,” Estevez said.
The other man laughed. “He probably stashed them outside somewhere, thinking he was all clever and shit. He’ll bitch and moan when we tell him he could have just shot them in the head and left them in the jail.”
“The lazy bastard probably did it fast then hitched a ride on one of the first trailers to get out of the heavy lifting,” Estevez said. “Bet you he’s halfway up the mountain by now.”
Rick saw Cassie wave at him again. She mouthed the words, He’s waking up.
Rick pantomimed a chokehold then pointed at Cassie. She looked horrified and shook her head. Just then, they both heard words from downstairs that turned their blood cold.
“Some stairs over there,” the tattooed soldier said. “I’m gonna check it out.”
“All right,” Estevez said. “But make it quick. We’re on the clock.”
Almost immediately there were sounds of heavy footsteps on the stairs. Rick moved away from the door, pushed behind a stack of boxes, and raised the gun so it faced the door. He looked over to the boxes where Cassie was hidden, hoping she was aware enough to hear the footsteps and stay out of sight.
The door flew open and banged against the back wall. Rick rested his finger on the trigger, tracking the man’s movements with the end of the barrel. If Jacobs came to and made a sound, he planned to take the man out. That was as far as his planning went. After that, every path looked bad.
“C’mon, man,” a soldier called from downstairs. “Estevez says we’re bugging out.”
“Just a second,” the tattooed man yelled back down.
He stepped into the room, and glanced around, but his stance was casual. Rick couldn’t believe it when the man pulled a cigarette from his uniform and lit up, taking long, hard drags from it.
Rick kept the gun trained on the man. It only took one small sound from Jacobs to turn the man’s smoke break into a bloodbath.
He held his breath as the soldier blew out a lungful of smoke with a satisfied sigh.
“Estevez says if you’re smoking up there, he’s gonna kick your ass,” the soldier downstairs yelled.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” the man said, taking a final drag, then flicking the butt to the floor. As he turned to the door, there was a scratching sound that came from the other side of the room.
The soldier froze.
His casual stance disappeared and the man crouched down, gun to his shoulder.
The sound came again. A rustle of paper this time.
Rick tracked the man with his gun as he moved across the room.
The soldier inched closer to a pile of boxes near to where Cassie was hidden. He put the barrel of his gun onto the nearest box and waited.
The sound came again and the soldier shoved the boxes to one side. Rick nearly pulled the trigger, but he held off the second he heard the high-pitched squeaks.
Mice scurried out from their hiding spot behind the boxes, running to new safety. The soldier jerked back then chuckled to himself. He pointed his gun at the nearest mouse. “Bang. Got ya, you little bastard.”
The door creaked open downstairs
. “Let’s go,” Estevez shouted.
“Coming,” the soldier said. He turned and popped a stick of gum in his mouth. As he passed Rick’s field of vision, Rick saw that the boxes the man had knocked over had exposed one of Jacobs’s boots. If the soldier had simply looked down, he would have seen it.
The man ran down the stairs, and Rick waited in his hiding spot until he heard the soldiers leave the jail. Walking carefully to stay away from the windows, he crossed over to where Cassie was hidden and stepped around the boxes.
She had Jacobs head on her lap, her arm wrapped around his neck. She was sobbing silently, her body shaking. Rick kneeled down and gently removed her arm from the man’s neck and held her.
“H-h-he w-w-was going to wake up,” she said. “I had to stop him, right?”
He reached down with one hand and felt for a pulse. The man’s open, lifeless eyes had already given him his answer.
“Oh my God,” she said. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” She spoke quickly, slamming her words together. “I was so scared I couldn’t I couldn’t let go I should have let go but I didn’t because––”
Rick held her at arms’ length. “Because that man would have killed us. You saved our lives.”
She nodded and wiped the tears from her face. Slowly, she brought her emotions under control. Finally, after she was able to take a deep breath without shuddering, she looked him right in the eye.
“How are we going to stop them?”
Rick rocked back on his heels. He looked out the window in the direction of the mine. All he could think about was Dahlia and Charlie on those trailers. Along with the entire town. The old ladies from the retirement home. Pete Roscoe. Big Mac and his son Lil’ Mac. Bertie. But not old man Roberts though. His body remained slumped over in the middle of the square. The reality was that the old man had just hurried up the inevitable. They were going to die. Every last one of them. He just knew it.
“Rick,” Cassie said. “How are we going to stop them?”
All he could do was stare out the window, right at the street where the last trailer had left the square. Mesmerized by the emptiness.
How were they going to stop them?
He wished he had an answer for her. But the truth was that he didn’t have a goddamn clue.
37
Keefer stood at the mouth of the mine entrance as the first AAV crossed the fence line and entered the compound. His chest swelled with pride when he saw that someone had affixed a giant American flag atop the vehicle. The plan was actually working.
He’d meant every word on the stage as the clock counted down. The men and women in the trailers, both soldiers and civilians, were true patriots. If he survived the next week, he knew it would mean that events in phase three of the mission had gone perfectly to plan. If he was alive, it meant he would have considerable power at his fingertips, more power than anyone, including the president.
If that were the case, then he intended to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to every single person on the trailers. Perhaps he’d even commission a monument. The fact that they were unwitting participants didn’t matter. He liked to imagine most of them, if explained the role they were meant to play in the hours ahead, would have volunteered for the job, even knowing that they were to give their lives to the cause.
They were Americans. They loved their country. How many young men had he seen run toward gunfire in the wars fought in other countries for reasons even corrupt politicians could no longer explain? How many fine soldiers had died to take a single village or cave from the enemy? Too many.
This was completely different. This was the salvation of their entire way of life. It was the restoration of the United States as the lone superpower in the world.
How could that not be worth any sacrifice?
The passenger door of the lead AAV opened and Estevez jumped out while the vehicle was still moving. He landed gracefully, reminding Keefer how much younger he was than himself. He just hoped the man’s youth continued to be an asset and didn’t turn into a liability. He’d hate to have to kill his best friend’s son.
As Estevez jogged in his direction, the younger man grinned wildly, clearly in the glow of success. As he walked up, he launched into his near-perfect impersonation of President Mayfield.
“My fellow Americans,” Estevez said. “I’m here to tell you today that our forces were victorious on the field of battle. Our country owes them a debt that can never be fully repaid.”
Keefer had to admit the voice was pretty good. It’d been enough to fool the people in town earlier that day. It’d been a good test as they intended to use it on the radio once all hell started to break loose.
But once Estevez got close enough, Keefer made a show of looking at his watch.
“Almost two minutes behind,” was all he said.
Estevez’s smile disappeared as he checked his own watch. What could he say? The time was the time, and the operation was a minute forty-five seconds off schedule.
They both knew that even making it halfway through the plan without being discovered had been a miracle. The odds against actually completing the mission had been so low that talking about the chances of success was a forbidden subject. Bringing the whole thing in with a two-minute margin of error was nearly incomprehensible.
Still, Keefer couldn’t resist the temptation to bust the younger man’s balls, if only for a second. He put an arm over Estevez’s shoulder and pulled him close as the first AAV passed by them. “Your dad would have been proud of you today,” he said. “Hell, I’m proud of you.”
“The men did well,” Estevez said, beaming. “The way you handled the sheriff was perfect.”
Keefer pulled his arm back. He wasn’t so sure about that. If he had to do it again, he just would have locked the son of a bitch up in the jail and let people think he’d tried to wander off. He’d put too much stock in the need for local leaders to help keep the crowd in check. It was a model from the Jihadi wars, paying off a tribal chief to be the face of whatever mission they needed to conduct among a local population. But this crowd had been Americans. Ready to trust their government and trust their military. The sheriff and Morris’s female scientist had been an unnecessary distraction. He should have made the call to remove them earlier.
“They were taken care of?”
“Affirmative,” Estevez said. “Took care of it myself.”
“Good,” Keefer said.
“Morris is going to be pissed.”
“I’ll deal with Morris. Let’s get these AAVs underground and this place buttoned up.”
“You got it. See you underground.”
Estevez ran up to the next AAV and jumped into the cab.
Keefer watched the parade of trailers for another minute then walked to the mine entrance. Estevez was right, Morris was going to be upset. But the road they were on was going to be paved with the dead, and it was about time Brandon Morris learned to deal with it.
38
Cassie stood at the front window looking outside at the abandoned Town Square. The sun had ducked behind the mountains, sending the valley into a weird, shadowy dusk with blue skies still evident above the looming peaks. The smoke screen dispersed by the helicopter had settled into the town, casting the entire scene in a grey veil. As if the abandoned town wasn’t creepy enough, the PA system was on, maybe as a joke on the way out by one of the soldiers. Strawberry Fields by the Beatles played over tinny speakers, making it all the more surreal.
Debris from the turbulent day cluttered the area. Knocked-over tents rocked up and down in the breeze. Trash stuck in the bushes lining the sidewalks. Birds pecked at the leftover bits of food, unbothered by the sudden disappearance of the population of an entire town.
Cassie was barely keeping herself together. All she wanted to do was run screaming out of the sheriff’s station, jump in a car, and drive right through the abandoned town, all the way to a place where there were people. Normal people.
Ones who didn’t talk about diseases wiping out the world or who stacked people onto trucks like they were no more than firewood. She wanted to find people in charge who could come to Resurrection and get back all the people who’d been drugged and kidnapped. They would set it all right. Put things back the way they were supposed to be.
But Rick had just explained to her why that wasn’t going to happen.
“We don’t know that they have checkpoints out there,” she said. “Maybe they’re all up at the mine now. Maybe we would just drive straight through without a problem.”
Rick shook his head. “You know I’m right, Cassie. They had to block the roads off so no one new came in while the operation was going on. They used a smokescreen to block satellite images, for God’s sake. You don’t think they’d block the roads out of town?”
Rick had scared her when they were upstairs. The way he’d withdrawn into himself made her think his hold of reality had finally snapped, that the trauma of seeing everyone he knew and loved hauled out of town had been too much for him. But then he’d come to, suddenly animated because he had a plan.
A ridiculous, insane plan that was going to get them both killed.
“We don’t need to use the main roads,” Cassie argued. “We use the back roads like you said, only we use them to get as far from here as possible until our cell phones work. Then we call in people that can really help.”
Rick shook his head. “The only place those back roads lead is out in the middle of nowhere. Old logging camps, abandoned mines, stuff like that. That’s why they won’t be watching those. I can tell you for certain there isn’t any cell phone reception out there.”
“Okay, let’s say they do have checkpoints out on the main roads, somehow keeping people out. How long do you think that’ll last? I mean, before someone questions it. Questions a communications black-out for a whole town? Even the state police have drones they’d send up here.”
“So you want to do what?” Rick said, raising his voice. “Just hunker down here and hope someone comes to the rescue? While all those people up there are getting killed?”