by Peter Sexton
“Where? What are you talking about?”
“Bear with me here for a minute, okay? During my time in the military as a Seabee, I heard stories about a secret underground railroad.”
“A what?” Skepticism and doubt rang through the air.
“No, listen. Following WWI, about the same time President Harding was pushing to establish the Bureau of Veteran’s Affairs, he proposed a Top Secret plan to build a fully-functioning railroad system that would be completely underground. There would be very few points of entry and egress. Their locations would be highly guarded, classified Top Secret or higher. The major fear was chemical warfare...nerve gas I think. Harding wanted there to be a secure method for transporting troops and supplies to strategic locations around the nation, should we ever face chemical warfare here on American soil.”
“That sounds pretty far-fetched to me,” Lawrence said. “Something the American government is certainly not good at doing is keeping something secret. If something like this really existed, we would know about it.”
Miranda ignored Lawrence and addressed Trammel. “Have you ever seen it?”
Trammel shook his head. “But I had this friend. One day while a bunch of us were drinking a bit too much, he let it slip. Told us about it, told us he’d been working on a phase of it. He said that when his father was in the military, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy had them test the first phase of it. My friend told us he knew how to get to it, that he could take us to see it.”
Sarah: “Did he?”
Trammel shook his head. Fear crept into the features of his face. “We were all supposed to go with him the next night...” He drifted off, dropped his gaze.
“What happened?” Miranda asked, beginning to feel a little frightened herself.
“He was dead by the next morning. They found a suicide note next to his bed.” He hesitated for several moments. “They said he shot himself in the head, just above his right ear.” He looked up and met Lawrence’s inquisitive stare. “He was left-handed.”
No one said anything more for a very long time. Then Sarah asked, “Did he even tell you where this supposed railroad was? How to get down into it?”
“Arizona,” Trammel said.
“Any more specific than that?”
Trammel shook his head. Then he said, “There’s an abandoned military base. We drove past it once.”
“You weren’t kidding about this being a long shot,” Sarah said.
“Do you think you can find that base again?” Lawrence asked.
“I don’t know,” Trammel said. “I think so. Maybe.”
“Well,” Sarah said, “if this underground railroad really exists, and that’s where they’re taking the tainted product, we’re gonna have to intercept the trucks before they get there. Because once they go under, finding them will be impossible. And convince- ing the media that we’re not all out of our minds will be even more difficult.”
“So this was their plan all along,” Miranda said. “They hired my dad and tricked him into helping them come up with a way that they could poison all those soldiers.”
“Looks that way,” Sarah agreed.
“But why? What will they get out of murdering our own troops?”
“Good question,” Sarah said. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. The only thing that seems fairly obvious is that they were setting your dad up from day one. Without the information we have here, it looks like he’s responsible for everything. They doctored the history of every electronic file related to this. No doubt they’ve produced altered versions of the hardcopy files, as well.”
“But they didn’t expect my dad to make copies of all the originals,” Miranda said.
“Or stash hardcopy printouts of it all,” Sarah added.
“I still don’t understand why they would want to kill our own troops.”
“The answer might be a lot simpler than you think,” Trammel said.
Miranda: “What do you mean?”
“This is going to sound really twisted. But do you have any idea just how profitable war is?”
“What?”
“There’s tons of money tied up in the war machine. Trillions of dollars in military budget funds could be at stake. If the budget was to be cut and the number of troops overseas was reduced, it would mean serious income loss for the industries who profit from military contracts. Of course, the proposed budget cuts would have to be aborted if a new credible threat was to surface.”
“You can’t be serious,” Sarah said. “This can’t all be about money.”
“WWI pulled this country out of The Great Depression. Can you imagine how many jobs would be lost if, today, the U.S. was to start slashing the budget?”
A dark frown enveloped Sarah’s face. “Jesus! Randi, he might be right.”
“What do you mean?” Miranda asked.
“It’s been on the news. There are substantial budget cuts being discussed.” She paused for a moment. “But if troops were to start dying over- seas...especially from an attack utilizing some kind of ‘unknown’ chemical weapon...” She let her thought trail off unfinished.
Then Miranda said to Trammel, “Could this really be happening?”
“Everything is pointing at that being the case,” Trammel said, “which doesn’t give us a whole lot of time. Whatever they’re planning to do, I think they’re gonna do it soon. And I think they’ve killed Puckett, which tells me they’re scrambling to do some serious damage control.”
“Who’s Puckett?” Miranda asked.
“One of the Earth’s Own security guys.”
Sarah: “So now they’re killing their own people?”
Trammel groaned. “He’s disappeared. And I haven’t been able to reach him on his cell.”
“This is more messed up than I thought,” Sarah said to Miranda. “The first priority is to get you somewhere safe, then we need to take this informa- tion public.”
“She’s right,” Trammel said. “They’re not going to abort their plans or they would have done it by now. And they know you have enough information to expose them, probably enough to shut them down completely, put a lot of people in prison for a very long time.”
“What do you think we should do?” Sarah asked.
Trammel: “You’re right. We need to get the media on board, then we need to find those trucks.”
Miranda and Sarah gathered everything into brown grocery bags: printed evidence, hard drives, photo- graphs. They were checking their weapons and supply of extra ammunition, when Lawrence and Steven came back into the house.
“Car’s all gassed up,” Trammel said. “You two ready?”
“Just about,” Sarah said. She moved around the counter and lifted one of the paper bags. To the men, Sarah said, “Wanna give me a hand getting these bags out to the car?”
Miranda looked up from the box her mother had given her. “Can you give me a couple more minutes? I need to finish going through this stuff my mother gave me.”
“We don’t have time, Randi. We need to get going.”
“Just a couple of minutes, Sarah. Please!”
Miranda watched the others as they carried bags from the house. Then she pulled a stack of newspaper articles out. They were bound by a single large metal clasp. She removed the clasp and rifled through the articles, scanning the headlines one-by-one: CLINIC BLAST CLAIMS ONE; POLICE INVESTIGATE CLINIC BLAST; FEMALE BODY IDENTIFIED IN ABORTION CLINIC BLAST.
Miranda read through this last article until she came to her mother’s name. The body in the rubble had been identified as Gillian August. And it claimed she had been killed while planting the bomb that destroyed the clinic.
“Jesus, Mother!” she said to the article. “What the hell did you do?”
Miranda lost track of how long she had been staring at the yellowed page of newsprint. Realizing there was still something more in the box, she stacked the articles together once again, replaced the large metal clip, and set them aside.
“What’s that?” Sarah asked.
Miranda hadn’t heard her come back into the house. She looked up slowly.
“Something from my father.”
“A letter?”
“I think so,” Miranda said, still staring at the envelope.
“You gonna open it?”
Miranda didn’t answer.
Finally, Sarah added, “If you’re gonna open it you need to do it, cuz we’ve gotta get moving.”
“Go ahead,” Miranda told her. “I’ll be right out.”
Once Miranda was alone, she tore the edge of the envelope off and withdrew the thin sheaf of papers from within. Tears hindered her vision, as she read the salutation. The letter opened: Dearest Randi.
Her father had never called her Miranda. From as early as she could remember, he had always called her Randi. At first, she had thought the nickname to be silly and inappropriate, and had only accepted it to please her father. Randi sounded like a boy’s name. But within a few months she had fully embraced the moniker, preferring it to her birth name.
She wiped the tears from her eyes and read the letter. When she reached the end, she went back to the beginning and read it again. When she had finished the second pass, she slowly stood up, carried the letter to the stove, lit one of the gas burners, and set the letter ablaze. She took the burning pages to the bathroom where she let them burn down to little triangles at the tips of her fingers, careful to let the ashes fall into the toilet, then dropped the charred triangles into the water and flushed it all away.
Miranda said nothing as she slid into the backseat of the Mustang next to her friend. They were backing out to the street when Sarah asked, “What did the letter say?”
Sixty-Five
Wednesday.
Steven Trammel was halfway down the driveway when he threw the Mustang back into first gear and stomped on the accelerator. The car jerked forward and the tires spit dirt and gravel, nearly causing Miranda to bite her tongue, as she was answering Sarah’s question about the letter from her father.
“What’s wrong?” Miranda asked. She turned and looked out the back window of the car, gazed into the darkness.
Trammel ignored her question. To Lawrence, he said, “Take the girls back into the master bedroom. Stay there until I come and get you.”
They all hustled to the back of the house. Miranda repeated, “What’s wrong, Steven?”
“Anderson’s here.”
“What? How do you know?”
“He’s down the street getting out of his car.”
“It’s not possible. How could he have known we were here?”
“I really don’t know,” Trammel said. “Just keep moving.”
Miranda stopped just inside the door, turned and grabbed his arm. “What are you gonna do?”
Trammel hesitated only a moment. “It doesn’t look like I have much of a choice. I think I’m going to have to kill him.”
They stood staring at each other for longer than they could afford. It surprised Miranda that Steven’s announcement didn’t horrify her. She simply accept- ed his statement as a matter of fact, something she understood simply had to be done. “I’m still in love with you, Steven,” Miranda said. She felt it was imperative she tell him this now, fearing it might be her last opportunity. “I want you to know that.”
He nodded. “I wasn’t fair to you, Miranda. I wasn’t fair to Maren.”
“No, you weren’t,” Miranda agreed. Then she added, “But that doesn’t matter now. There’ll be plenty of time to discuss this later.”
Miranda understood what he meant by “unfair.” She had stayed up nights thinking about their situation, thinking about what she might possibly have done to make things different, make things better for Maren and herself. But Steven was several years older than she. When Maren came along, just six months after Miranda’s twenty-first birthday, she had thought that would somehow change things. She knew Steven loved her, and he had loved Maren, too.
“Help me turn over that table so I can use it for cover. Then you need to get to the back of the house with the others.”
Miranda did as she was asked.
“Things have changed,” Trammel said before she left the room. “I no longer care about the job. It means nothing to me. And I don’t care what anyone thinks about our age difference. All I care about is you.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Not long ago this announcement would have been exactly what Miranda had wanted to hear. Now she wasn’t sure how it made her feel, or how she should react. Everything was different now. All she was certain of was that she hadn’t stopped loving him.
“Why are you telling me this now?” she asked.
“In case...I just...I need you to know.”
Miranda wiped her face. She could hardly see through the tears.
“Get out of here now. Go back with the others.” A beat. “Hurry. Go!”
Miranda hesitated, paralyzed by this new in- formation.
“Go, Miranda!”
She leaned in and kissed Trammel hard on the lips, forgetting time as she held him close.
Trammel hadn’t bothered to lock the front door after they reentered the house, so it served as no obstacle. He crouched behind the upturned table just inside the kitchen and waited for Anderson to appear. The door eased open slowly, and Anderson glanced around the front room before stepping inside. He had his weapon out in front of him, following it into the house. He looked around for a moment, then posi- tioned himself beside the open door.
“Miranda August?” he called out. “We need to talk. I’m not going to hurt you.” Anderson made no further movement into the house. “I need to talk with you about your mother.”
More uneasy quiet followed Anderson’s words. Trammel had his weapon in hand, hoping the man would just turn and leave. But that wasn’t what he did. After calling out to Miranda once more, Anderson began moving deeper into the house. Before he was halfway to the kitchen, Trammel rose from behind the table and stepped in front of the open doorway, weapon aimed at Anderson’s chest.
“That’s far enough,” Trammel said.
Anderson stopped. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Have you lost your fucking mind?”
“Maybe,” Trammel replied. “Maybe I’ve just finally come to my senses.”
“Where’s the girl?”
“Not here. I’ve been waiting for her, but she hasn’t shown.”
“What do you think you need that for?” Anderson asked, pointing at Trammel’s weapon.
“Just a precaution.”
“Precaution for what?”
Trammel moved the gun this way and that, as he attempted to shrug his tense shoulders. He was surprised that Anderson appeared to remain calm.
“Well,” Trammel said. “I’ve had no luck reaching Puckett or any of the other team members. It’s making me feel...I don’t know, a little paranoid.”
Anderson shook his head, as if to dismiss Trammel’s announcement as utter nonsense. He took a step forward, and Trammel drew the hammer back on his revolver.
“Stay where you are,” Trammel said.
Anderson stopped mid-stride. “You’re making a big mistake. That girl can bury us, get us all sent to prison, if not killed.” Again, he started moving toward the kitchen.
Trammel fired a single shot. It flew just to the side of Anderson’s head and lodged in the doorframe behind him.
A scream issued from the back of the house.
“Goddamnit, Trammel!” Anderson cowered back- ward. “Put that fucking gun down.” Then a smile crept onto the man’s face. He wiped perspiration from his forehead with his shirtsleeve as the smile widened. “She hasn’t shown?” Anderson said. “So who was that who just screamed? The maid?”
Trammel ignored Anderson’s sarcasm. “In the movies they always say something stupid like, ‘You have to the count of three to get out of here before I kill you,’” Trammel said. “But we’re not in a movie. So I’m just going to tell you once. Get out of here now so I don’t have to pull this trigger again.”
Anderson was nodding when he said, “All right, I’ll go. But let me say this:” He raised his voice and called out toward the back of the house. “I have Miranda’s mother. I was going to trade her for the package. But I guess that’s not going to happen now.”
The door to the master bedroom swung open then.
“Stay where you are!” Trammel screamed at the sound of the footsteps approaching from behind him. But the footsteps kept coming, and he turned toward the sound. Just as he saw Miranda walking through the door, Trammel realized his mistake. Before he was able to turn back, he heard the explosion of gunfire, felt the sharp burning sensation under his right shoulder-blade. He heard more shots, saw blood spray onto Miranda as she continued into the room.
“Get down!” he managed to shout. He turned and emptied his gun without managing to hit Anderson even once, his injured arm rendered almost useless by the gunshot wound.
“Oh my God!” Miranda screamed. “NO!”
Then the shooting ceased and the room fell preternaturally quiet and still.
Sixty-Six
Miranda only saw a blur of movement before her eyes as the gunshots exploded in the small room. She hardly felt Lawrence pushing her out of the way, as he dove between her and Anderson. A woman screamed. Miranda didn’t know if the scream had come from herself or Sarah. When the chaos cleared into focus, and the white flash washed out of her eyes, Miranda saw Lawrence on the ground in front of her, face up, losing blood from at least two gunshot wounds in his stomach and chest.
An eerie quiet hovered in the room following the gunfire, as if time had frozen them in that silent moment.