Body by Blood

by Patrick Johnston

  “How are you going to plead in court?”

  “Why did you want to bring down your own company?”

  “Did you help Jeremy Porter?”

  I turn at the mention of his name. “Help Jeremy Porter?”

  The journalist elaborates on the question. “Did you help Jeremy Porter escape from federal custody this morning?”

  One reporter actually obstructs my path with her microphone, which hits me in the neck. “What do you say to your brother, Thomas Verity, and the Pro-Life Legislative League president, Jim Cobb, who publicly condemn you for breaking the law in kidnapping your company’s property?”

  “My granddaughter is a person, not property,” I reply.

  Several loaded questions amount to nothing more than insults. I keep my countenance firm against the rest of their inquiries and their baseless charges.

  Shane Mease and I are briefly separated. He turns, reaches for me, grabs my shoulder and pulls me through the merciless gauntlet of bodies, wires, and bright lights affixed atop camera lenses.

  At the squad car, I look over my shoulder, hoping to see one last smile from my sister, but she is nowhere to be found.

  When we arrive at the unmarked car, the police officer puts his hand on top of my head and helps me into the back. Mease hurriedly motions for my driver to hit the road as the officer affixes my seatbelt. “I’ll see you at the station.” My eyes follow him as he turns and heads toward a black hover-mobile idling behind the squad car. I wish I could stay with him. I trust him.

  Before the door is shut, a muscular male journalist inserts a microphone into the open door to prevent it from closing, and asks, “Have you heard they found your daughter? They’ve taken custody of your granddaughter’s dupe and are planning to go through with the replacement Monday?”

  The news is like a bolt of lightning right to my heart. The officer slams the mic into the door just to spite the journalist. He then pushes the journalist and his busted microphone away and tries to shut the door, but I unfasten my seatbelt and stick my leg out to stop it from shutting. “Hold on. They have my granddaughter?”

  The bald police officer appears irate that I have obstructed his attempt to shut the door. “Put your leg back in the car or I’m going to break it!”

  I comply, and he slams it shut.

  I keep looking back to see if Mease’s hover-mobile is following. He is, closely. From the silhouettes visible through his windshield, there are others in the vehicle with him. There are two officers in the front seats of my car. The bald officer in the driver’s seat is speaking in soft tones via his nano.

  “Officer?” I seek his eyes in the rearview mirror. “Do you know who I am?”

  He ignores me.

  The dark-skinned officer in the passenger seat keeps turning and looking back at me, appearing to be unsure of himself.

  “Raymond Verity?”

  I nod. “En route to this squad car, a reporter claimed my granddaughter Mary Nell Verity has been taken into custody and returned to the New Body Research Center. Do you know if that is true?”

  He shakes his head. “No. But I want you know that I think you’re getting a raw deal. You risked your life to save your granddaughter, and that is an honorable thing.”

  “Stop talking to him!” the bald driver orders.

  “Please, officer,” I beg. “I just want to find out if it’s true. Can you check for me?”

  They refuse to answer. The younger officer dons mirrored sunglasses and ignores me.

  I am surprised by the speed with which we are moving on the interstate, passing cars and hover-mobiles like we’re an ambulance racing to get a dying patient to the E.R. I look back to see Mease’s driver struggling to keep up. Behind him are several television vehicles also bypassing cars, attempting to keep us in view.

  “Excuse me, sir?” I search the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Why is it necessary to drive so fast?”

  “Yeah, Will, don’t let your Nascar obsession go to your head,” the officer in the passenger seat mumbles.

  The driver taps behind his ear, disconnecting his nanophone. His gaze is darting from the rearview mirror to the road, back and forth. He gradually slows until Mease’s hover-vehicle is right behind me. Without warning, he swerves from the far left lane of a four-lane highway between two vehicles all the way to the right exit ramp. The momentum of the sharp turn throws me against the wall. With my cuffs, I am unable to brace my collision.

  I don’t know how long I am out, but when I awake it is to the sound of a gun blast. My ears are ringing. I open my eyes. My vision is blurry and my head throbs. I look up. The dark-skinned officer in the passenger seat is seizing from a bullet hole in the side of his head. His blood has splattered between the seats. I feel its wetness on my knees. The driver is breathing heavily. Still grasping his weapon, he looks back over his seat at me. I close my eyes, feigning as if I’m still unconscious.

  He unbuckles his seatbelt and steps out of his car, leaving his door open.

  “Why did you shoot Jake?” someone outside the car asks.

  “He wasn’t with us.”

  The second man—who I presume is an accomplice—is furious. “You idiot!” he screams. I get a glimpse of the side of his face. He’s young with black hair, with a thin 5 o’clock shadow. “We are not the bad guys here, man. Raymond Verity is a terrorist and we’re going to get him to the FBI for a fair trial.”

  “And if Jake wouldn’t help us, he’s helping him! Jake was threatening to turn us in.”

  “Why didn’t you talk to me about it first?”

  “Because I didn’t want you to talk me out of it! If we want the reward, at least one of us has to be willing to do the hard things.”

  “Why the police car?”

  “It’s unmarked!”

  “It’s still traceable. Why in the world didn’t you change to a civilian vehicle like we planned?”

  “I didn’t have a choice. I was being followed closely.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He hit his head. I’ve checked him. He’s fine.”

  I hear the accomplice angrily smack the car.

  “They can track these cars!”

  “I disabled the tracker.” The driver reaches in and pulls a handle to pop the hood. “See for yourself . . . ”

  When they are on the other side of the raised hood, I raise my head and take a look around me. My blurry vision has resolved, but my head still throbs severely. I am under what looks like a wide overpass beside a narrow stream. Trees obstruct my view of the skyline. From the infrequent sound of passing automobiles overhead on the bridge, we are in a more desolate place than downtown Atlanta, for sure.

  I listen carefully to the conversation.

  “If he’s a terrorist, he goes down either way,” the driver argues. “It’s the feds for five or FAM for seven and a half. That’s two and a half mil more, man. That makes it a no-brainer.”

  FAM? They must be referring to the Free America Militia, the same group of thugs who tried to execute me on the internet before Farrell and his team rescued me.

  The hood slams shut and they come back around to the side of the vehicle. One of them opens the door and reaches in to check my carotid pulse.

  “As soon as he comes to, we’re handin’ him over to FAM.”

  “That was not our agreement!” The accomplice is insistent. “This is more about justice than it is about money.”

  “Georgia’s leaders are joining the alliance Alabama is building. Whether we go with the feds or FAM, either way, we’re jobless, and probably indictable. But with FAM we can afford to get out of dodge.”

  “If you hadn’t killed Jake, we wouldn’t need to flee! The feds were going to scratch our records clean outside of Georgia for returning Raymond Verity, but for killing your partner?”

  “Why do you talk like you are in charge of this thing?” The driver curses. “This was my plan! My plan! And we’re going with FAM.”

  The
accomplice’s protest dwindles. I hear some digital numbers pushed in a phone beside the door.

  What should I do? With my hands cuffed behind my back and car doors that cannot be opened from the inside, all I can do is pray. I pray for the leaders of the resistance to be brave and do right. For their people to support them. For the life of my granddaughter. For the soul of my wife. For my captivity or death to mean something.

  “Alpha–Tuna–4–3–6–Alpha.” The driver pauses and listens to the person on the other end of his phone. “Seven and a half, and he’s yours. You’ve got to come to us. We are at 33.313997 north, -83.436919 west. We’re under the bridge where it crosses Badger Creek, in Oconee National.”

  With FAM on their way, my death is near but I feel no fear of it. As a matter of fact, I feel like a coward for not rebuking the betrayal of these officers.

  “What you’re doing is wrong!” I sit up, and fix my eyes on them through the window.

  The accomplice is shorter, with a thin, deeply furrowed face. He pokes his head through the open driver’s door and aims a black handgun at my head.

  “I’m not scared of you,” I say. “Those militia fanatics are going to execute me on the internet. What can you do? You’re going to stand before God with my blood on your hands.”

  “You have the audacity to preach to me?”

  I turn my gaze to the bald officer on the phone outside, and overhear, “He’s a feisty fellow, Jase. Just heard him say that he’s not scared of you.”

  He pauses, and then laughs a long gravelly cackle.

  “My granddaughter is going to be killed if you don’t let me go. If you want profit, I can double it.”

  The officer snarls at me and brings his handgun to my upper lip. “I thought I told you to shut your trap!”

  “You can listen to money talking, I think.” I grin at him and wink.

  He cocks his gun. I see hate in his eyes.

  The two men are obviously not very kind to each other, so perhaps I can use that to my advantage. “If you shoot me, you’ll lose your portion and your partner here will probably give you the same treatment he gave Jake.”

  The snarl dissipates and the man glances at the bald officer outside the door, who continues trading belly laughs with the FAM leader on the phone.

  “Do you really think he wants to split his profit with you? He did all the hard work. He’s already shown he has no strain of conscience in killing a fellow officer.”

  “Eavesdrop on two minutes of a conversation and you have already become an expert? Please. There are things you don’t know. I’m indispensable. I’m a pilot, and I have a friend in the TSA who owes me a couple favors. I can get us to the coast and to the Dominican Republican on one tank.”

  Well, so much for Plan A.

  “Are you a father or a husband?” I ask him. “Don’t you care about them? If you hand me over to them, you’re going to be a hunted man.”

  “Not outside of Georgia. Besides, my wife has spent more time in the psych ward than in my bed since my only daughter died a year ago. I won’t miss much.”

  “I can respect you handing me over to the feds, given what the government’s saying about me. But the Free America Militia? Do you think you can hand me over to a bunch of militia terrorists and the government won’t know? They have insiders in all those groups.”

  The man coldly turns his gaze away from me, appearing resistant to my reasoning.

  I overhear the bald guy on the phone. “The coordinates are right. The Oconee National Forest . . . ”

  Maybe there are bow-hunters nearby. The shooting may not have alerted nearby hunters, but my screaming might.

  I lay down, raise my legs, and kick the window with all my might, cracking it.

  “Hey!” The officer reaches over the seat and tries to restrain me. He grabs me by the laces of my right shoe. With my left foot, I kick the window again, and with the right I kick the officer in the face. My left foot impales the window, and the officer falls back from my right kick, striking the horn.

  The door I smashed is thrown open and the bald officer begins to beat me in the legs with his baton. They are designed to cause pain without fracturing bones, but I cannot imagine the pain being any less severe if they had run me over with a semi. I scream and shirk away from his repeated blows, trying to pull myself across the seat away from him. With my hands cuffed behind my back, my movement is limited. I do manage to kick the officer in the front seat in the face again—accidentally this time. As the officer outside leans in and continues to strike my knees and ankles, the officer in the front seat wipes his bloody nose and unsheathes his Taser.

  The electricity seizes my body. I scream a teeth-clenched, gurgling cry against the uncontrollable spasm, not even feeling the continuous violent blows on my legs.

  Suddenly and surprisingly, I am covered with blood. Is it mine?

  The voltage finally ceases, though I continue to cramp in my chest and shoulder. The man with the Taser frantically turns toward the window.

  A loud blast precedes the splattering of blood all over the windows on the driver’s side of the vehicle, casting an eerie red hue on me from the sun’s rays through the glass. The officer yells loudly. I cannot hear the words projected from his lips, as the Taser has caused a persistent high-pitched squeal in my ears.

  Whatever he sees strikes fear in him—I see it on his face. His lips move, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

  He places his hands on the back of his head and falls out of the car, landing on his face.

  Gradually, my senses return and I am able to sit up. The blood on my legs and the driver’s-side windows is not mine. The bald officer who was beating me with his baton took a shot in the head. The Taser barbs are still stuck in my chest and shoulder. Their spring-shaped wires go over the front seat, down to wherever the Taser landed when the officer dropped it.

  I turn to the window and see a face I never thought I’d see again—Tod Farrell, with his odd-looking assault weapon, rushing toward me. This time he is wearing camouflage.

  “Dr. Verity!” I see his lips move, but his voice sounds distant, like an echo across a great canyon. He helps me out of the back seat of the squad car and, with a pair of special pliers from his backpack, removes the Taser probes from my chest. He unlocks my cuffs and begins to lead me up the hill toward the road as a dozen camouflage-clad Alabama agents surround us in a diamond-shaped pattern. One of them drags the surviving police officer in cuffs behind me. I can barely walk from my leg pain, but the attempt to walk up the hill helps restore my bearings.

  “How did you find, find me?”

  Farrell reaches down by the back of my belt and slowly pulls a paperclip-shaped device from it. “I put it on you in the elevator in the Georgia Statehouse, when you were preoccupied.” I furrow my brow as I study his illegal contraption in between his thumb and index finger. “Sue me.”

  “They’re coming,” I say.

  He stops and grabs me by both shoulders. “Who?”

  “The feds?” a soldier besides him inquires.

  I shake my head. “The Free America Militia.”

  Farrell’s brow furrows, and his mustache begins twitching to the left again. He glances at the surviving police officer. “You were going to turn him over to FAM?”

  “I was planning on turning him into an FBI contact in Roswell, just north of Atlanta. My partner had other plans. He shot that other officer in the squad car, Jake Camma. I wasn’t in on that! Dr. Verity is my witness. My intent all along was to help the government.”

  Farrell gives some unintelligible orders to his team, and they scatter into shadows under the bridge and into the tree line.

  “He’s right,” I say between deep gasps of air from the climb. “It was the bald guy that took charge and called FAM.”

  “They offered more,” the young police officer added. “Seven and a half mil compared to the feds’ five mil.”

  Farrell scowls, which surprises me. He always seems so light-hearte
d under pressure, an easy smiler, in spite of his involuntary lip tic.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “The feds control the Free America Militia!”

  “What? That’s crazy,” the bound police officer objects.

  This doesn’t compute. “How can that be, Tod? The militia killed several feds when they captured me north of Atlanta and tried to kill me.”

  “That was a splinter group in defiance of FAM’s leadership. The feds have been using FAM to create crisis in order to set the stage for further erosion of constitutional liberties. Whenever they do capture one or more of them, they protect them. They release them from custody and even provide new IDs for them. The princes and the pirates are holding hands, I’m afraid.”

  “What does this mean?” I ask. “Could it be another splinter group?”

  “Don’t think so. I have an insider in D.C. who keeps me up-to-date. If FAM’s coming, we could expect either FAM with the feds’ permission, or the feds. But either way, they are certain to have their eyes in the sky on us any minute, if they don’t already.”

  “Why are we sitting around here waiting?” the bound officer asks, an anxious tremor in his voice. “Let’s just leave!”

  “I didn’t want our vehicles attracting attention on the side of the road, so I sent them down a bit and told them to turn around and come back. Should be here in about”—he looks at his watch—“a couple of minutes. What’s your name?”

  “Pete Kragg,” he answers. “Why would FAM offer us more money than the FBI, if FAM works for the FBI?”

  “I didn’t say they work for the FBI, Pete, I said they work for the feds. The FBI is only one of many tentacles on this monster. The feds were probably testing your loyalty. Now that you’ve defied them, they’ve probably set their crosshairs on you, too.”

  The officer’s face contorts. “I have a daughter; she’s sick. I just needed the credit, and I thought that . . . ” He turns to me. “I thought you kidnapped those kids.”

  “How can you kidnap your own grandkids when their mother—my daughter—voluntarily goes with us?”