Oasis: The China War: Book One of the Oasis Series

by James Kiehle

  He opened it up and his eyes widened.

  “Motherload,” Russell said. The freezer was still cool but slowly warming. Still, there was plenty of meat laid out in bins, all still frozen. He selected a prime steak big enough for three and set it in the fridge to thaw.

  Perry almost danced around the room. Joyous, he found himself whistling.

  Russell scrambled two eggs and ate them quickly, wondering if every bite of food was contaminated, but not caring.

  Hypochondria be damned.

  When he finished, Perry prepared to walk back to the van.

  On his way out the door, Russ noticed a grandfather clock that worked without electricity. It was five o’clock, probably the next afternoon. He’d slept that long? Russell shook his head as he realized he’d get back around dusk and started to rethink trying to walk to the van.

  Then he realized he had to go back: his wife and daughter’s worn tee-shirts were still in the van. Irrational, but vital. His lone connection to them, other than memories.

  Before he left the lodge, Russ took a Pendleton jacket he found in a closet, then used the john and soon determined he had set a new world record for longevity. During urination, he could have grown a beard.

  Call the Guinness Book, he almost laughed.

  •

  Maddening. Judy Perry, so appealing, so sexy, so… distant, yet she harnessed a heavenly, gravitational sexual pull to Roger. Oral sex with her had been excellent and he remembered all too well how beautiful she looked on her knees, worshipping his cock. Still, Roger was uncharacteristically concerned as he saw Iris looking on at the dinner. So young and pure. At her tender age, had Iris ever seen porn? Maybe once caught mom and pop in the laundry room, hollering Get out! Get out!?

  Lind didn’t care about kids, didn’t care about Judy’s husband or knowing her history. He just wanted to fuck her hard, his interest lived only on a carnal plane. If Roger just got one chance to see Judy naked, touch her tanned skin, feel those tantalizing mid-sized economy breasts, then get to insert A into B, he could make this a voyage something to remember.

  And really, did he have that much to live for?

  It was time to think about getting more aggressive. Stop being the gentleman.

  But for now Lind could only peek, with no laying of hands, no exchange of fluids with her mouth or the second set of lips farther south. Roger would have to be content to sleep alone in his cabin, take cold showers and outwardly pretend they were just friends—or becoming friends—and keep his sexual notions where such ideas had always dwelled, buried bone deep in his brain’s backyard, where only the dog in him could dig it up.

  Time to get militant.

  Inhibitions be damned.

  •

  Russ found a machete in the basement and used it to clear a path, hoping to intercept the primary trail a quarter-mile away and get back to his van. He hacked his way through the low shrubs and high grass, then found an animal trail he was able to improve on and eventually located the north-south route. Russ was only fifteen yards from his original path and could see his bright green arrow marking and the red cloth wrapped around a fir tree. He spent a few minutes widening the entry to make it more obvious, then followed his red flags and markings on the original trail back to the Dodge.

  Perry approached his van with an uneasy feeling caused by something he couldn’t place. Something in the air.

  He sniffed.

  Campfire smoke?

  Thinking that someone had built a fire at his site was a prospect that excited Russ. He walked fast down the hill until he reached his minivan where smoke was rising from his makeshift fire pit. He approached the area more cautiously, then stopped abruptly when he saw a girl.

  She looked up at him with gigantic brown eyes. For some reason, she almost looked familiar.

  “Hi,” the girl said, with a trace of a southern accent. She was pretty and blonde, probably no older than twenty, wearing a tee-shirt that said I’m Not Her.

  “Take off your shirt,” Russ told her.

  “What?” Her eyes registered more surprise than fear.

  ”Take it off now,” Russ said forcefully.

  The girl didn’t know what to say or do. She started to lift the top up, then paused and dropped it back down, a defiant look on her face.

  “Now, listen, you pervo,” she said. “I know we’re out here with few around, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let you play some sick—”

  Russ held up his hands, embarrassed. “Wait. No. I’m sorry. It was my wife’s,” Russ told her, his tone softer. “It was the last thing I saw her wear.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” she replied. “Where’d she go?”

  Russ, surprised, tried to ease his angry look.“I can get you something else from the van.”

  The girl nodded, gave him a wan smile. “I don’t know my size, but this fits.”

  Russ rummaged around until he found a shirt and a sweater that might fit her, handed her the stuff and crouched down by the fire. She looked up at him with watery coffee-colored eyes no bigger than chestnuts.

  “Gonna turn around, mister?” she wondered. “Prove you aren’t a pervert?”

  Perry almost laughed, and then issued his first full smile from before the madness.

  “I’m not as sick as they say.”

  The girl’s reaction was not to add to the mood but to register fear, as her eyes went from chestnut-sized to cantaloupe and darted to the side as if trying to convey something.

  “What is it?” Perry asked. “Spinach in my teeth?”

  Behind him, he heard a rustling and started to turn.

  “You just hold up there, Jim-Bob,” a man’s voice said, “You’re in my camp and I got me a big-ass gat just ready to blow.”

  Russ had to interpret. Did he say ‘gat’ ala Sam Spade?

  “By gat do you mean gun?” Russ asked.

  “Don’t make me use it, pal,” the man said, his voice a raspy threat. “I’d hate to kill a stranger.”

  “You only kill your friends?” Russ asked as he made a move that the man behind him couldn’t see but the girl could. Russ figured if she’d been the guy’s partner, the fear in her eyes would not have been so pronounced. Perry took a chance and showed her the concealed weapon. Her nod was almost imperceptible as he turned halfway.

  Paden bit his lip and eyed the man. Too big to fight.

  “Small world. I have a gun, too,” Russ said, showing his dad’s unloaded forty-five, now aimed at the chest of a man with a real gun. Perry snapped the safety just for the sound effect and tried to look under control.

  The man was in his twenties, about five-foot-seven and wiry, with a face shaped like an opossum. Dark stubble and black circles around his bulbous eyes which showed mostly as white, his pupils the size of peppercorns.

  Thinking he looked dangerous but stupid, Perry surprisingly said, “My name is Russ. What’s yours?” and the guy’s expression turned from testy lunatic to confused goofball. He didn’t know what was up.

  “Uh, Glen Paden.”

  “Well, Glen Paden, we both have guns,” Russ said. “Mine’s a little bigger but I hope I don’t have to use it. I’ve already buried people and I’m a little cranky. I’d like to use my bullets to kill some game, make rabbit stew. Do you like rabbit stew?”

  Paden looked like an invisible someone was squeezing him, his eyes huge and suspicious. Perry felt the fear shifting. “I like rabbit stew,” Glen said. “I think. I’ve never really had it.”

  This made Perry grin. Paden stepped back warily.

  Russ decided to play his wildest hand. If he lost, he’d get probably get shot. But so what? Everyone else was dead. He could live or die at this point—that didn’t matter. To lose his life because he was protecting his campsite or reclaiming a tee shirt some pretty southern girl had worn were not the issues. It had nothing to do with logic or reason because those things were out the window. His options were clear. In that moment, Russell Louis Perry would define the end of his existence.
In this confrontation, he might very well get shot, but he’d die as his own hero.

  “You don’t have any bullets in that gun, do you?” Russ gambled. “You aren’t loaded.”

  Glen’s prominent Adam’s apple bounced like a carnival strength meter, and his voice wavered when he replied, “No, it ain’t.”

  The girl’s relief was audible but Russ continued to stare at the man as if his weapon was full. As it was, Russ didn’t know if he could even take Paden in a fist fight but he knew for certain that bullets would not bounce off his own chest and was thankful that the con worked.

  Russ said, “I’d ask you to stay, Glen, but your greeting was not exactly friendly, so off you go.”

  Paden didn’t know how to respond. His pistol dropped limply in his hand, hanging on his index finger—fearful eyes that bordered on insanity. He abruptly began to stumble backwards towards the trees.

  “And don’t come back,” the girl said.

  “Hold on a second,” Perry called out.

  Glen stopped and turned around cautiously.

  “Are you hungry?” Russ asked.

  “I will be. I ate some of yours.”

  “I’ll give you something for the road,” Russ told him and walked back to his van, gathered a small plastic bag full of an odd assortment of things that didn’t need cooking and marched it back to Paden.

  “Listen, if you ever pull a gun on a man again,” Russ said, handing it to him, “make sure it’s loaded. A bluff might get you killed.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” Glen wagged his head shortly, wheeled around and disappeared into the dark trees.

  Perry turned back to the girl, then crouched down and put out his hand.

  “Like I told him, name’s Russ,” he said.

  “I’m— Daria—I think,” she replied awkwardly, taking his hand and shaking it firmly. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Charmed, I am definitely sure,” Russ smiled, feeling like he’d somehow reconnected with the world. “Can you help me lug this stuff?”

  Daria smiled pleasantly. “Do we have a place to take it?”

  “A lodge.”

  “Is there a name?”

  “Temple Mountain.”

  30. The Lodge

  When she saw the Temple Mountain Lodge, Daria said, “Are you shitting me?”

  It was majestic. A palace. She had to close her mouth, which dropped quickly, then she said, “Are you Irish or something? How’d you get so lucky?”

  “It does have a certain je ne sais quoi,” Russ shrugged. “But no power and no running water.”

  She walked onto the porch. “I think it’s amazing.” Daria felt the wood around the door, then opened it up, gasping slightly when she saw the main room. “I’m overwhelmed.”

  Russ took her on a tour of the place, Daria taking special interest in the kitchen.

  “I think I used to cook,” she said. “I’d like to cook some meat. Do you have any meat?”

  Perry clicked open the fridge and pulled out the fully-defrosted steak and slapped it on the table.

  “It’s a rib-eye,” he said. “We’ve got more.”

  Daria’s eyes brightened. “More?”

  “More.”

  •

  Glen Paden spent a miserable night—hungry, shivering cold, furious that he had to bluff with a bullet-free gun, but more angry that the fellow, Russ, had seen through his charade.

  Paden had not gone back to the van, fearing that Perry would shoot him, and had wandered in the dark woods wondering where the hell he was and what he could do to survive.

  It seems he was always running, always having to claw out a survival.

  Days before, Paden had escaped both the Medford Police Department and Oregon state troopers, wanted for his part in a bank robbery that had gone horribly awry. Paden and Ernie Feathers had breezed into the Wells Fargo bank branch out by the Medford airport with guns drawn and ski masks over their faces and announced their intention to take the bank’s money.

  Unfortunately, one of the bank customers had been an off-duty cop who tried to stop them. Before Glen could make off with a single dime, shots were fired.

  Paden wasn’t even sure who shot first. He’d heard the sound of a gun going off and Glen fired his weapon towards a line of screaming customers with his eyes closed. He opened them and saw the off-duty sprawled on the floor. His partner, Ernie, had his mask blown half-off and was writhing in agony—a gunshot wound to his face, bleeding kegs of blood.

  Glen wasn’t a bank robber. He just needed cash. It hadn’t even been his idea and only wanted enough money to pay for his sister’s abortion and a little extra to take the bus out of town, move up to Eugene, and maybe enroll in community college.

  But then everything spun out of control. Paden stood with an empty revolver and looked down at his severely wounded partner, hating him. The robbery had been Ernie’s idea. Fast and safe, no one gets hurt, Feathers had assured him, but then Ernie was lying on a parquet floor, pouring blood out of his head like he was being pumped.

  Feathers could barely whisper. “Help me, I’m paralyzed.”

  Glen had the look of a madman even when he was calm; everyone in the bank had been afraid of his wild eyes. No one moved, though one man’s eyes darted as he spotted the slain cop’s gun laying on the floor. He looked about to move towards it but Glen beat him to the punch and slapped the man hard in the face with the gun barrel.

  “No one else needs to get hurt here, people,” Paden told them, waving the recouped gun. “Let’s just all get down on the floor. One of you tellers put the money in a bag and I’ll be on my way.”

  They fell to the floor like children in a fire drill, aside from a lone teller who began stuffing a canvas bag with cash. Paden sensed that no one else would cause him trouble, but still, there was the problem of Ernie Feathers and his serious head wound. Paden looked over at a woman in her seventies and asked, “What would you do?”

  The woman looked surprised. She had pinkish hair and dressed like someone’s Aunt Bee. She held her purse in front of her like a shield.

  “About what?” the lady asked.

  Glen looked at her with his mad eyes and tilted his head down to the floor.

  “Would you put him out of his misery?” Paden asked.

  Stunned, the woman looked at Glen blankly, then seemed to understand the question and slowly fixed her gaze on the bleeding accomplice.

  “He’s lost a lot of blood,” she said finally. Her eyes were both caring and unnerved. “He’s in pretty bad shape.”

  “I imagine he’d be pretty much a vegetable the rest of his days,” Paden said absently. “That ain’t no way to live.”

  “I imagine not,” the woman said quietly. Still, she screamed along with everyone else in the bank when Paden shot Ernie Feathers at close range in the back of his skull.

  “No way to live at all,” he told them.

  •

  Russ and Daria got a sense of the Lodge’s property. On the north side was a cliff that dropped to the new lake below. To the south, they saw a fence.

  “What’s past the gate down there?” Daria pointed.

  Russ realized the fence was probably what caused the traffic jam before the flood.

  “I didn’t come this way,” he replied. “I took that old deer trail or whatever it was.”

  The road was covered in gravel and Daria slipped a little. Russ caught her and she smiled, almost blinding him. That’s what seemed familiar to him about the girl: her teeth.

  The closed gate was secured with a padlock, but the fence was too high to climb, so Russ started walking west along the length of it with Daria tailing him. After a bit, deep in the woods, the fencing stopped and they retraced steps back the other way until they were again on the road.

  “I’ll have to find some wire cutters or something to get that gate open. We can’t very well come and go by skirting the fence,” he said.

  “I saw keys in the basement,” Daria told him. “Maybe the
key is on it.”

  Ten feet up, they stopped and Russ swore under his breath, though Daria didn’t mince words.

  “Mother Mary and holy shit,” she said, holding her nose.

  At least twenty cars, trucks and all manner of vehicles were scattered like a spoiled brat’s toys on the roadway, some on end, some on their side, some upside down.

  And more bodies than that littered the pavement or hung out of car windows. The gruesome find completely wrecked them, drove them to their knees and Daria to pray.

  “What can we do with the bodies?” Daria asked.

  “As gruesome as it sounds, we bury them.”

  •

  The older lady peered at the dead man and held a shaky hand over her mouth, stifling a cry.

  Glen Paden had said, “I’ll be taking your car now. Which one is it?”

  Armed with her keys and cash pulled from the bank’s drawers, Glen scrambled away and hopped in her car and tore out. He heard a wail of sirens coming from behind as three squad cars chased after him. Paden powered the 1998 Lincoln at top speed down a road that flanked the I-5 freeway and passed by the airport. Seeing the terminal sign, Paden suddenly slammed on his brakes, reversed his direction, and drove back to the gated entrance. The squad cars were catching up to him, so he roared onto the airfield and tried to intercept a plane that was about to take off. The Cessna was idling on the tarmac when Paden pulled in front of the plane and blocked its path.

  “Hey, what the hell are you doing?” the pilot yelled out his window, barely audible over the thunder of his engines. “Move your damn car.”

  Paden got out and pointed the gun at the pilot.

  “Tell you what, chief, I’ll help you move your plane, you son of a bitch.”

  •

  On the Oahu Queen, dining at the captain’s table, the likely end of the voyage was at hand, so bacchanalia seemed to be a worthy goal. The wine and hard liquor flowed, the beer had long since been downed. The almost stereotypical gruff, grey, mustached sea captain mumbled a speech no one even vaguely heard or remembered, something about the dead, blah, blah. The skipper was a sodden mess—thank God he wasn’t on the bridge—verging on tears at one point, almost falling down from someone’s juvenile antics and balls-out buffoonery a few moments later—fart and blonde jokes seemed reliable measures—but Roger, not listening, wouldn’t get the humor anyway. He spent the entire evening studying Judy across the table for any signs of impairment, not to save her from a hangover, but to exploit her condition.