by Jim Heskett
Once he was on the other side, Alma shook her head. “I will wait here. You can bring it to me.”
“Come on, Alma, don’t be a pussy. We should do this together. Plus, don’t you want to see where Anders and LaVey made their final stand?”
She rolled her eyes and huffed a few times, but eventually, she dropped to her hands and knees and crawled across the ladder. Now on the other side, George clapped his hands together. “See? That wasn’t so bad.”
Alma would not indulge him with a smile. Her insolence amused George. He was almost surprised how little he cared about the defeat in Boulder last night.
Everything was about to improve. He couldn’t wait to see the looks on their faces.
Up ahead, he spotted a glassed-off room to the right, with the letters TSA in fading paint. “There.”
They all three picked up the pace to reach the room. Inside was a cot, a couple of notebooks likely filled with Anders’ last gasps of a manifesto, and some piles of clothes. For a man who once had designs to rule the world, it was almost sad to see how he had spent his last few weeks and months. Holed up like a terrorist hiding in filth and squalor.
Alma and Hector drifted to the far side of the room and dug through the closets and drawers of the multiple desks along the wall.
“What are we looking for?” Alma said. “Is it literally a black box?”
George spied a dark rectangle in the corner near him and smiled. It had to be there. He dropped to one knee and opened a suitcase to see the ebony box right there, sitting on top of a folded pair of slacks.
His heart thumped. Finally, after all these years.
George reached out and opened the box. A ballerina popped up, music trilled as the gears made the ballerina twirl. He winced as tears welled in the corners of his eyes.
“What is that?” Alma said, standing at the far side of the room. Her accusatory finger hovered in the air.
George set down the music box, and then he dug his hands into his jacket pockets. From each, he removed a 9mm pistol. Pointed one at Alma and one at Hector.
“That,” George said, “is a music box. One I thought I would never see again.”
Alma’s eyes flicked to the guns. “What do you think you are doing? Put those away, right this second.”
“All of this,” George said, waving the guns around to articulate his point, “is fruitless. We lost this war a long time ago. I was happy in Virginia, hiding there, where no one knew who I was. Lincoln wasn’t a perfect substitute for her, but he was good enough. And then you came along.” He lifted the gun to point it at Alma’s face. “And you uprooted me. I knew if I said no, you would kill me. And I also knew I could find a way back here to reclaim what Peter Anders stole from me. I knew you would safely escort me right to it.”
“What did he steal?” Alma said. “What the hell is happening?”
“Hector, you met my daughter only once, during LaVey’s first year in the Senate. Such a vibrant thing she was. So full of life. I often wondered where she got it from, you know? I was all doom and gloom back then.”
“What are you going to do?” Hector said, his rasp barely intelligible.
George sighed. “This is where we’re going to part ways. You will stay here, and I’m going to give the old college try to going back east. Maybe Florida, if I can find some place warm and quiet.”
“You would give up on this country?” Alma said, spitting her words like knives. “You would abandon the dream?”
“Always the idealists, you Castillos.”
Without another pause, George pulled both triggers at once. He shot Hector in the forehead, but the other gun had been pointed a little low, and the bullet passed through Alma’s right arm. George fixed it, though, by shooting her a couple more times. Once in the chest, once in the head. Then for good measure, he kept firing until his magazines were empty.
He waited there for two more minutes until he was sure they weren’t going to get up and make a move, then he snatched the wooden music box and dropped his spent pistols on the floor.
He opened the box and listened to the melody for a few more seconds, smiling to himself. Then, he clutched it to his chest and left the TSA office. Finally free. Edward LaVey, Beth Fortner, Hector Castillo, and Alma Castillo were dead. All extremely dead. George was the only one of their little tribe left, and he had zero desire to carry on with that Five Suns torch of cleansing the world’s governments of their corruption.
All he wanted was to fade into obscurity and try to squeeze out a few more years. Maybe find someone else like Lincoln, someone he could mentor. A project.
Back in the skybridge, he even felt like whistling. However many more years he had left, he was going to live them as a man free of the past; free to be whoever he wanted. Free.
Until a face appeared around the edge of a statue on the other side of the skybridge.
Kellen Richter, holding an AR-15.
“Hey, George. You got fat.”
George swallowed, said nothing.
Kellen took a few paces forward, to the edge of the broken skybridge. “Was this ladder your idea?”
George raised his hands in surrender and nodded.
Kellen kicked the ladder away, where it slipped into the void, sunk, and clanged to the ground, sixty feet below.
Kellen raised the assault rifle, pointing it at the music box. “What’ve you got there?”
“A music box.”
“A family heirloom?”
George nodded. “Something like that.”
“What the hell is your family heirloom doing at DIA?”
“Anders took it from me, to piss me off. Control me. I thought I’d never see it again, but when Alma and Hector showed up, I saw my chance.”
Kellen looked past George, squinting. “And where are they now?”
“Dead, on the floor in the office Peter Anders was using as his bedroom.”
“I see.”
Kellen paused for a second, sniffing.
“You could let me go,” George said. “I’m not in the game anymore. I want no part of any revolution.”
“Just you and your music box living out your days in a remote hillside town, right?”
The sinking feeling intensified in George’s stomach. “That’s right. I’m not going to bother anyone. I’m willing to leave the past in the past if you are. We’ve both survived for so long, my boy. Let’s see if we can’t do it for a little longer. What do you say?”
Kellen’s face soured as he gritted his teeth. “You held me hostage for years, George. I almost lost my leg because of that shackle you kept on me. Most nights, I don't sleep. I wake up, thinking I’m still on one of those endless series of cots you kept for me.”
“I’m not that person anymore, Kellen.”
“Yeah? Well, neither am I.”
George noticed the pinch in his stomach at the same time as his ears registered the blast of the rifle. His insides twisted and then he felt a warmth on his belly. His intestines spilled out of a hole in his stomach.
He sunk to one knee, at the edge of the opening. Woozy, bleary, his body wanting to lurch forward.
And then, as he slipped and felt the open air of the rift in the skybridge meet his face, before he tumbled to his death, he watched Kellen Richter laughing at him.
Chapter 40
Quentin - Nederland
They waited a full week before even thinking about going near the Timber Lodge to open the bunker. Quentin wanted to be absolutely sure Rappaport and her people were not lurking nearby. Had installed no spies in town. They would have certainly claimed eminent domain and seized this whole area for their military goals if they knew the truth.
Losing Coyle to a bullet from a child had been the beginning of the end, at least for Quentin. Never again would he choose to feed the war machine.
The morning sun crested the peaks to the east, and Quentin and Farrah stood on the lodge patio, breathing the chilly air. Farrah swept her binoculars from left to right a
cross the open space of the valley below them. Steam plumed from their lips. The trees rustled with a light breeze. A half dozen deer wandered across the empty parking lot, poking their snouts into the snow.
“Anything?” Quentin said.
“Looks good to me. Nothing in the hills. Some activity in the valley, but that’s our people.”
She handed the binoculars to him, and he stuffed them in his backpack. “Okay. Let's do it.”
Quentin and Farrah rounded the building to enter through the back and lifted the fake tile over the stairs. He hadn’t been here in quite some time. The darkness of the space below always unnerved him at first, which would lead to him feeling silly after. Enclosed spaces would forever make him nervous.
She clicked on her headlamp and took those first hesitant steps on the wooden stairs to descend into the bunker. It was basically a hollowed-out cave with a grated metal floor. A large space with many pockets of darkness. Rows and rows of warheads, boxes of grenades, land mines, and ammunition. Enough death to win several battles, maybe even a war.
But the food was why they were here today. The stores equaled enough to feed the dwindled population of this community for decades to come.
“We’re going to get the batteries and medications too, right?” Farrah said as she ran a hand across the smooth curve of a missile warhead.
“Of course. I was thinking we’d replenish the landmines in the hills, then we get the food out. Move the perishables from the cold storage, then dry goods, and then medications and supplies. Will probably take a few trips.”
“And then what?”
Quentin clicked on his flashlight and walked from row to row. He paused at a crate filled with rocket launchers sitting on top of a bed of hay. He raised one and traced his fingers along the cylinder. “I don’t want this to be Willam’s future.”
“You'll not get any argument from me. But it’s not like we can toss a grenade down here.”
He nodded. “Right. Not unless we want to collapse the mountain.”
“Okay, so what’s the plan?”
A strategy like this should have been Coyle’s area of expertise. “Maybe we build an irrigation channel from the ski runs down here. Flood the bunker, then we leave it open to freeze.”
Farrah sucked on her teeth for a second. “I like it. It could work.”
She walked to him, and he put an arm around her. She nestled her head in the crook of his arm. “This isn’t going to fix everything, you know.”
“I know,” he said. “But, this is the thing we can do. So let’s do what we can do. We’ll leave the rest up to Willam, and whoever else takes it on when it’s no longer our turn.”
Farrah shined her headlamp along the breadth of the bunker, across the endless rows of implements of destruction. With their hands clasped, they turned back toward the exit, determined to change the future, or at least, this little bit of it they could control.
A note to readers
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Books by Jim Heskett
See the full list of all Jim Heskett’s books at www.RoyalArchBooks.com
About the Author
Jim Heskett was born in the wilds of Oklahoma, raised by a pack of wolves with a station wagon and a membership card to the local public swimming pool. Just like the man in the John Denver song, he moved to Colorado in the summer of his 27th year, and never looked back. Aside from an extended break traveling the world, he hasn't let the Flatirons mountains out of his sight.
He fell in love with writing at the age of fourteen with a copy of Stephen King's The Shining. Poetry became his first outlet for teen angst, then later some terrible screenplays, and eventually short and long fiction. In between, he worked a few careers that never quite tickled his creative toes successfully, and hasn't ever forgotten about Stephen King. You can find him currently huddled over a laptop in an undisclosed location in Colorado, dreaming up ways to kill beloved characters.
You can scour the internet to find the occasional guest post for various writing websites such as Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, Quips and Tips for Writers, the Blood-Red Pencil, and a few others scattered here and there. He believes the huckleberry is the king of berries and refuses to be persuaded in any other direction.
Details at www.jimheskett.com
www.jimheskett.com
For Keller Nash, because hopefully you won’t have to recruit an army of gang members to do great things some day.
Copyright © 2017 by Jim Heskett. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Published by Royal Arch Books
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Afterword
The idea for the Five Suns Saga came to me while I was eating steak and rice at a little Japanese restaurant in Boulder, Colorado. A thought popped into my head:
What if everyone thought the world was going to end, but then it didn’t?
I envisioned a group of friends living in a world in which a meteor hurtles toward earth, threatening to destroy humanity. But as the whole of society riots and descends into lawlessness, at the last moment, the meteor changes course. Then the friends are left to do… something… after the world doesn’t end. I hadn’t worked that part out yet.
From that, I changed the idea to: what if everyone thought the world was going to end, but it turned out to be a hoax? And that’s when the Five Suns began to form in earnest. I envisioned a sprawling, seven-volume epic about a group of heroes traveling the world to uncover the roots of the meteor conspiracy. The problem was, I had no idea how to write a sprawling, multi-book saga.
So I decided that the story needed to be told in manageable chunks, so we could see how the collapse of society affected not just a small group of heroes, but many people. That had never been done before, as far as I knew.
And I wanted to have several voices tell the stories, for the sake of variety, so I created a literary journal, created a website, and went live. I wrote a couple of stories myself and published a 5,000 word back story and set of rules for the world, then sat back and waited.
The problem was, I couldn’t get anyone interested. The rules of the world were too specific: no sci-fi technology, no radiated mutants or zombies, this has to happen after that, etc. People don’t want to write in someone else’s world, particularly for a brand-new literary journal that isn’t paying them anything.
So I abandoned the literary journal. But, since I’d already written a couple short stories on my own, I thought the overall tale needed to stay in that format. I would have some recurring characters and some threaded plot lines and subtle links between the stories. And by using that format, I could fill the world with lots of different characters while leaving a fair amount to the reader’s imagination.
And now that I’ve fallen in love with the world and some of the characters, I may yet expand on that sprawling epic series. My wife says it’s called Five Suns so there need to be five books (duh), so we’ll see…
&n
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