“Quite a house.”
Dublin gave a small nod as she rested her chin against Reese’s chest. She sat back up and looked at Reese and then toward the room’s window.
“You think we’re gonna make it all the way out to Manitoba, Reese? To that priest? It still seems so surreal sometimes. It wasn’t more than a month ago we were in Anchorage wondering if we might want to go back to Dominatus, build a new home there, and now we’re out here in the middle of nowhere in Canada. The drone attacks. Those things screaming in the woods. Poor Bear falls through the ice. The bandits. And now we’re sitting here in this beautiful home in a town that that looks like it’s from a time my grandfather would have been a young man in. I’m trying to wrap my mind around all of it but…I don’t know.”
Reese didn’t respond to Dublin’s comment right away. He too was feeling as if things had moved so incredibly fast for them the last few days, as if sometimes he was outside of himself watching everything as it happened. Instead, he leaned his face into Dublin’s hair and simply allowed himself the pleasure of her being there with him at this moment.
As the smell of the meal Bear was cooking up crept into the room, Reese stood up and walked over to the window and then turned back around to face Dublin.
“How about we call dibs on this room for the night? That bed looks pretty comfortable.”
Dublin gave a sly smile and bounced on the bed a few times.
“It feels sturdy.”
Reese’s eyes opened wide in mock surprise.
“Why, Ms. Dublin Meyer, I do believe you’ve turned into something of a woman of ill repute.”
Dublin fell back onto the bed and spread her arms out across the thick, cream colored blanket.
“I stopped caring about my repute years ago, Reese. You done corrupted me with your big city ways.”
Reese walked over to the bed and leaned down to kiss Dublin’s lips.
“I aim to please.”
Dublin’s mouth frowned slightly as she looked back up into Reese’s eyes.
“Well…it took you a while, but your aim has gotten a little better. Just a little…”
Reese stood back up and nodded toward the door.
“And on that note, I think I’ll go back downstairs and get a bite of food before Bear eats it all. Just in case I need my strength later tonight.”
Dublin jumped up from the bed and walked with Reese out into the hallway, taking his hand into her own.
XXIV.
Mac looked up into the bright, warm Louisiana sunshine of his small backyard. He could hear his mother preparing lunch in the kitchen that was just inside the small poured concrete patio where his dad would barbecue his favorite spiced chicken wings every Friday afternoon for family and friends who would visit, drink, and talk late into the evening while Mac’s mom would tell everyone to stop cursing in front of the children.
It was mid-July, and the weather forecast was for temperatures to reach nearly ninety degrees by late afternoon. The humidity was causing Mac’s t-shirt to cling to his chest. It was the kind of day his dad called “hotter than a billy goat in a pepper patch.”
Mac could hear his mother walking outside from the kitchen. He turned to see her dressed in the light blue summer dress with the white lace collar she wore so often this time of year. Her reddish hair was tied neatly behind her and her lean, unlined face smiled down at him with the love and affection Mac had always remembered emanating from her. Where his father’s moods could quickly turn dark, Betty Walker seemed perpetually in good spirits, even during times of challenge, and in 1973, there was plenty of challenge facing the people of Carville, Louisiana.
In his mother’s hands she carried a paper plate with a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich cut neatly in half with the crust taken off, just as Mac liked it. On the side she had placed four apple slices sprinkled lightly with cinnamon. While the thousand or so adults of Carville faced uncertain economic times and still rampant racial tensions, for kids like nine year old Mac Walker, the place was a refuge of small town simplicity tucked away just a short drive from the big city of Baton Rouge, alongside the banks of the Mighty Mississippi. Mac’s father, Merle Walker, was an assistant administrator at the Carville Leprosy hospital, a facility that had, by 1973, served patients of that terrible disease for nearly a hundred years.
“You make sure to come inside if it gets too hot out here Mackenzie. There’s cold lemonade in the fridge if you want. Just remember to wash out your glass and put it in the sink when you’re done.”
Mac’s mother always called him by his full name. To everyone else, he was simply Mac.
Her thin fingers tousled Mac’s blonde-brown hair before she turned to walk back into the house. Mac watched her go, and then focused fully on the food. As was his habit, he took each of the apple slices and placed them inside the sandwich, two for each of the halves. Having completed that task, both sides were soon to be devoured.
Mac remembered last summer when he felt his father’s eyes staring at him as he placed the apple slices in between the slices of white Wonder Bread as he had just done.
“Mac – why don’t you just have your mother put the apple slices in the sandwich when she’s making it?”
His father’s voice had always scared Mac. It issued forth from him like a deep, scratchy rumble that often bordered on an outright shout.
“Answer your father, Mackenzie.”
Mac had looked to his mother and then glanced back at his dad. He feared if he stared too long into the hazel green eyes that looked out from behind his father’s thick framed glasses, they would find something wrong that would cause him to yell at Mac.
“Well…if Mom did it, then I wouldn’t get to do it myself.”
Mac’s dad sat looking down at his son for what seemed to Mac like an eternity. Finally he looked over at Betty and smiled, while pointing a finger back at Mac.
“That makes sense to you, honey?”
Betty placed a hand on her husband’s knee and looked down at Mac and smiled.
“Why, yes, I think it makes perfect sense.”
Merle Walker looked back at Betty and then down at his son and smiled as well.
“Ok, then – fair enough.”
Today though, Mac was able to finish the sandwich without being watched. Or so he thought. From the back of the yard, emerging from the shadows of the old Juniper tree that Mac had spent hours climbing for as long as he could remember, a tall ,uniformed bald man was walking toward him. There was a light blue patch on the upper right chest of the man’s uniform, and he was grinning so widely, Mac thought the man might be able to touch each of his ears with both sides of his mouth. The smile reminded Mac of illustrations of the Big Bad Wolf. He even had a row of abnormally large, white teeth. Though only nine years old, Mac already sensed the man was very dangerous to him.
Instinctively he turned to look back toward the house, where he knew the safety of his mother could be found. To Mac’s horror, his house was no longer there. Behind him now were only miles of dessert – the sanded wastelands of Libya, just outside Benghazi.
You’re dreaming.
Mac told himself what he was seeing wasn’t real. He had been dreaming of his childhood and then for some reason he was now dreaming of Benghazi. Mac turned to see the soldier still approaching him from the back of the yard.
“Hello again, Mac. I told you I would be seeing you again, in a way at least. That gift I promised you. I’m here to make sure it was delivered. Once a gift is promised, it must be delivered, right, Mr. Walker?”
Mac looked down at his hands and saw they were still those of a nine year old boy. At the same time, his dreaming consciousness was screaming the name of the tall man with the wolf-smile that now stood over him. It was the man who had come to Dominatus two years ago, and brought with him the destruction and horror of the drones. The man who Mac had personally fought in hand to hand combat atop the frozen ground of the Alaskan wilderness.
“Stand up, Mac
. Stand up and look at me.”
Mac didn’t want to stand, but in his dream, his limbs were no longer his own. He kept his eyes looking to the ground as he felt himself rise up. August Hess was no more than a foot away from him. Mac could feel his warm breath on top of his head.
“Look at me.”
Mac screamed for his head not to look up, screamed for his eyes to close tight and not look at the monster, but they wouldn’t listen.
August Hess’s wide grin grew even wider, and Mac caught a glimmer of something metallic in Hess’s dark eyes.
“Here’s your gift, Mac. Just as I promised you back in the cave. Back in Dominatus.”
The knife slowly cut through and pushed into the center of Mac’s nine year old chest, until it was sunk hilt-deep. There was no real pain, just an odd sense of pressure, as if something was sitting on top of him making it difficult to breathe.
August Hess placed both of his hands on each of Mac’s shoulders, and leaned down so they were face to face.
“You’re no different than me Mac. Never were, and you never will be. And you’re right you know…there is no god. Just darkness. Terrible, black, unending darkness. And me. Oh yes, I’ll be there, Mac. I’ll always be there in you. At least what’s left after I’m done eating you from the inside.”
August Hess’s mouth continued to spread wider and wider, and now instead of the large, white, human teeth he had revealed before, his mouth was full of little gleaming daggers that curved backward toward his throat.
“Get away from my boy, you monster!”
The voice of Mac’s father bellowed from behind, and August Hess took a startled step backward. Mac felt the arms of his mother grab him up as he saw his dad step between him and August Hess.
Merle Walker was not a terribly big man, but his mother had told Mac once that he knew well enough how to handle himself. His father had spent two terribly cold and brutal winters in Korea during that war, and it was there, his mom said, that Mac’s father had left whatever innocence was left in him back in the bloodied snows of that war torn country.
As he was being carried back by his mother into their house, the knife still sticking from his chest, Mac watched as his father grabbed August Hess and threw him to the ground, his right hand repeatedly striking Hess’s face. Mac was having more difficulty breathing as Betty Walker set her son onto the couch in the living room. She did not appear panicked, only sad as she placed a small pillow under Mac’s head and attempted to straighten the hair that had fallen over his forehead.
Mac’s father soon joined Betty as he too looked down at his son while placing his bloodied right hand around his wife’s waist.
“August Hess is gone, Mac. He won’t come back here anymore.”
Mac began to cough uncontrollably, and felt warm blood oozing from the corner of his mouth and run down his chin. He began to panic as it quickly became more difficult for him to breathe.
“Ssshhhhh now, Mackenzie. It’ll be all right. Just rest now. Soon enough, it’ll be all right. You’ll be back home soon.”
Mac’s mother took a cool, wet cloth and dabbed the blood away form her son’s chin and mouth.
“Don’t tell him that. He still has work to do.”
Betty Walker turned angrily toward he husband, her voice rising up against the words of Mac’s father.
“He’s done enough already! This is too much! He’s tired, Merle. He’s so tired now. They can’t keep expecting him to go on. Not anymore. He deserves to rest. He’s earned that rest.”
Growing up, Mac had rarely seen the gentle side of his father. He had always been a man direct in his expectations of others, and unrelenting in seeing those expectations met. Now though, Merle Walker leaned down next to both his wife and son, and tried to comfort both of them.
“I know, Betty, but Mac made a promise, and he’s always been a man to keep a promise. That’s how we raised him. He’s his mother’s son, and that means he’s gonna keep doing what he can until he can’t do it no more – and that time hasn’t arrived just yet.”
Mac watched as a row of tears dropped from under each of his mother’s eyes as she drew close to kiss his forehead before whispering into his right ear.
“You do what you have to do, Mackenzie, and we’ll be waiting for you when it’s done. Don’t believe what that monster said. It’s not all dark. Not for you. Not for you.”
Mac sat up clutching his chest in the bed he had fallen asleep on just a few hours earlier inside the Wilfrid Guest House. A painful cough erupted inside of him, causing him to focus on simply being able to take another gasp of oxygen. As had happened back at the cabin earlier, when he removed his hand from his mouth, the palm was covered in blood.
Without speaking, Mac walked quietly from his room and to the hall bath across from Bear’s room and down the hall from Reese and Dublin. Cooper had taken the bedroom on the lower floor of the house.
Closing the bathroom door behind him, Mac found himself still struggling for air, his head growing dizzy from the exertion. Taking a towel from the rack next to the sink, Mac turned on the cold water and soaked the towel before using it to clean off the blood from his hands and face. Finally he was able to take a full breath as he looked into the mirror above the sink and saw the gaunt face of a tired old man staring back at him, followed by the words of August Hess from his dream.
You’re no different than me, Mac. Never were, and you never will be.
“See about that, you bastard.”
Mac then closed his eyes and heard the voice of his mother.
You do what you have to do, Mackenzie, and we’ll be waiting for you when it’s done. Don’t believe what that monster said. It’s not all dark. Not for you. Not for you.
Mac opened his eyes and again saw his own face looking back at him. He thought perhaps he didn’t look quite so old after all. Not so ready to call it quits. He had just managed to take out five Muslim bandits, after all.
I know, Betty, but Mac made a promise, and he’s always been a man to keep a promise. That’s how we raised him. He’s his mother’s son, and that means he’s gonna keep doing what he can until he can’t do it no more – and that time hasn’t arrived just yet.
His father was right. Mac had made a promise to help get everyone to the priest. To the weapon that was supposed to help bring down the New United Nations. He was dying, quick now, but not so quick that he didn’t have time to follow the mission through to the end. He’d do that, and then…well…whatever.
Before his dream tonight, Mac hadn’t thought about his parents for a very long time.
He hadn’t realized just how much he missed them…
XXV.
As he had told them after dropping them off at the guest house yesterday, Imran was back at noon to pick up the group and take them to meet the godfather. Imran’s mood was, as usual, upbeat and cheerful as he stood on the porch waiting for the others to walk outside to join him.
The temperature, though just above freezing, was comfortable as the sun shone down on the faux green lawns and plants of the Acorn Drive neighborhood. A man walking his dog paused to wave to Imran, as Brando barked from inside the house as he spotted the Golden Retriever moving down the sidewalk.
“How about we walk? We’re going to Mel’s Diner for lunch. The godfather will meet us there. Just down the road – we passed it last night on our way here.”
Cooper shrugged.
“Fine by me, Imran, whatever the others want to do. I’m gonna have Brando stay here at the house anyways.”
No one objected to walking to the diner, though Mac looked as if he had slept very little during the night. Dublin was the first to mention something to him.
“You look tired, Mac – sleep ok?”
Mac buttoned up his coat and waved Dublin’s concerns away .
“Fine. Probably got more sleep than you two did.”
Despite his attempts at humor, Mac moved noticeably slower than the others going down the porch steps.
Halfway to Mel’s Diner, Bear nudged Imran with an elbow.
“So tell me, Imran…this place actually owned by a guy named Mel?”
Imran shook his head and chuckled.
“Not a man – a woman! Mel is short for Melanie! She’s a great cook! Wonderful woman! All the way from San Francisco.”
Wilfrid’s Main Street was bustling with vintage cars driving by, young boys and girls on bikes, and people moving into and out of various small businesses. It truly was small town America somehow reborn in the vast open fields of northern British Columbia.
Imran pointed to the stoplight that hung across the intersection above them as they waited to cross the street to where Mel’s Diner was located.
Military Fiction: THE MAC WALKER COLLECTION: A special ops military fiction collection... Page 113