Assassination Day

by David J. Wighton

  "We'll keep that a secret, shall we? And Will?"

  Once again, a secret had to be exchanged and this again provoked a giggle or ten.

  "You can all open your eyes," Yolanda announced. "As I'm sure you now know, Winnie can see what you're thinking when you concentrate. She can also see what mood you're in. She didn't have to borrow Will's bot to draw the lines on her hand tracings because she could see what he was reading by just looking at his head. She can enlarge the image by putting her face onto yours. Everything that she said before to us was the truth. She didn't lie and she didn't do anything wrong. There are some things that I still don't understand but right now, I've arranged for Winnie to receive a little reward for being such a good girl in spite of me doubting what she had said. And this reward is also to make up for all the painful headaches that she's had. Sweetie, we're going to find a way for you to handle those, OK?"

  "I'm getting a reward?"

  "For being so brave."

  "I can't see it in your head. What is it?"

  "You'll have to wait. Meanwhile I want you to go to your bedroom and change into your play clothes because you're going to get all dirty. Will and Izzy will take you to your reward."

  Instructions were duly given. Directions to a nearby community were easy to follow. Winnie flew up the stairs and pulled Will and Izzy out the door. A sharped-eared observer could have heard her giggling as she skipped down the path sing-songing "I saw Will and Izzy kissing; I saw Will and Izzy kissing . . . "

  "Yolanda said to think of something that I liked doing," Will said lamely to Izzy.

  "I like it too, you know."

  "Izzy, I wish I hadn't made you so upset . . . "

  "Later, Will. I wish some things too. Let's take Winnie to her reward first. She's going to love it."

  # # # # # # # #

  Doc was staring into the air and whittling without looking at the stick when Hank shimmered into view and rushed by him into the house. "Granny's with her," Doc said to the gust of wind going by.

  Winnie had left the house only two minutes earlier. As soon as the door had closed, Yolanda had burst into tears and cried out, "She can't turn it off." Granny rushed towards her daughter, enfolded her, and led her away, both of them weeping profusely. Doc had called Hank and then sat outside so that the women could be alone. He threw the shredded mess of gouges and hackings that had once been his whittling stick into the underbrush and went into the house to see if he could help.

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  Chapter 19

  Some historians have criticized the Wilizy's lack of foresight in not watching Alberta's cities more closely. If they had, these so-called experts claim that the Wilizy would have noticed the wave of construction that took place on the roofs of public buildings in early August. Mind you, that construction only happened at night, and each antenna extension took only ten minutes to install, but these wise-men claim that the Wilizy should have been watching.

  I take a more realistic view. Will and Izzy became a couple in October of 2081, only 10 months before. The Wilizy as a group was only formed in April 2082. By August, Hank had created the beginning of the peddler network that would provide the Wilizy with gossip and hard intelligence, although it was not always easy to determine which was which. Wolf's surveillance of the military posts was also operational by this time, but he had few spies to supplement the Wilizy's long-range sensors. By necessity, since their battlefield numbers were limited to four adults, five teenagers, and five children, the Wilizy were restricting their activities to Alberta's forests and rural areas – the areas that were safest for them to operate in. Still, these experts argue that the Wilizy should have been able to predict what Zzyk would do next in Alberta's five cities and then prevent him from that doing that.

  I have two words for such critics. Unhappily, I am unable to express those two words in this document due to the High Censor's rules about vulgar language in public documents. I believe there's a time and place for such words, but I must abide by the edicts we live under or the public won't be able to read this story. So instead, I'll just tell you to think of what comes out of the end of the horse after it has digested its food. That's what I say to those critics.

  # # # # # # # #

  Everyone quickly became very active after Izzy warned, "Get all your non-Wilizy business finished in these first two weeks of August. I have six plans under consideration. We could be running an operation any time between mid-August to mid-September."

  The boys were cutting trees again and hoping to trade for more fruit and vegetables before summer was over. Winnie was helping as well. Wizard had wanted to build more wagons, but they didn't have time for that. He said he'd make them over the winter and Will offered some wagon wheels that he had collected from Coronation.

  Stu found an old dump outside of Kamloops. Discarded metals and plastics were abundant. When Will heard the magic word metal, he took a look. Izzy said that he was still smiling when he arrived home. Will started taking all the iron and steel he could grab and ferrying it up to the top of Mount Robson where he had secreted the other metals he had taken from Coronation farms. He didn't know what he was going to do with it all yet, but metals like this had to be stockpiled and concealed. Nobody was going to be hiking to the very top of Mount Robson's tree line where Will was depositing his treasures and few solar helicopters could fly that high. Will mentioned that he had also seen a lot of white coffins and that had brought Hank to the dump where he had found rows and rows of stand-up freezers.

  Hank asked for Doc's help ferrying a dozen freezers back to the compound and setting them up. A dozen were needed so that the youngsters could have their own freezer to store the food that they'd receive from the firewood sales. Plus, there'd be several freezers for the family as a whole and one freezer to store venison for Winnie's new pet. Will would strip the freezers of their power plants and replace them with filaments powered by pinky ring batteries after they were in place.

  Will's filament pallets made easy work of transporting the freezers through the ground-level hallways of Hank's compound, past the underground rock-walled bedrooms, and into the cave system in the mountain behind their home. Doc received the guided tour even into the smaller caves and then to the escape hatch to the outside. It was protected by a security system requiring a password code.

  "Will's going to set it up so that the door will open and close if Winnie's pup approaches. I was hoping that you could insert the necessary electronics into the pup's body."

  "Shouldn't be a problem," Doc replied.

  That led to the real reason why Hank had asked Doc for help. He wanted Doc to give him an honest, blunt opinion on Winnie's health prospects. It did not escape Doc's notice that they were having that discussion deep in the bowels of a mountain where no young ears inside an invisible sling might overhear what they were saying.

  "I need more information," Doc said. "I know Granny's thoughts, but not Yolanda's."

  "We had known that Winnie was going to be a healer for some time," Hank started. "What we didn't know was that she was also going to be a reader. Granny, Yolanda, and Yollie can read general character traits and intentions. Winnie's powers have much higher sensitivities – she can actually read thoughts and moods. Most importantly, Granny, Yolanda and Yollie can turn their powers on and off at will. Winnie cannot turn hers off. If the people around her have strong emotions, she'll sense them. The stronger the emotion, and the more people that are around her, the stronger the effect will be on her. When her brain can't handle all the noise coming in, she gets headaches. They won't go away until she can find a quiet place to recover. That's what we know right now but this is all new to us."

  "The marshmallows? Where do they fit in?"

  "Winnie's powers kicked in on her birthday – which was probably a coincidence – and she started seeing things in people's heads. She saw a snippet of conversation in Yolanda's head where I had joked that eating marshmallows would be unhealthy
for a 6-year old girl. When all the noise started entering her head, and the headaches came, she thought it was from the marshmallows. So she quit eating them, but finding their hiding spots was still fun. But the headaches kept coming back. At first she got them from Lucas and Theo who were constantly thinking of ways to beat up on each other. Then Yolanda became worried about the headaches and that made Winnie worse because she thought Yolanda was angry with her. As Winnie got worse, everyone else became anxious which made Winnie even worse. Anxiety and anger look the same to her. She can't differentiate between the two."

  "What have you told the family?"

  "Everyone knows that being angry at someone when Winnie is around will hurt her. We've kept the other news from the youngsters for now. But we have ten people in the immediate family, plus Will and Izzy, plus Granny and you. The sheer amount of noise that could come into Winnie's head when we're together could be overwhelming to her. So Yolanda made the snap decision to take the last remaining pup in a cousin's litter. The pup's exact parentage is unknown. The mother was a domesticated dog; a big black wolf has been roaming the area and the pup has the same colour. Yolanda thought that when Winnie became stressed, she could go to her bedroom with the pup and cuddle it. It would be like being in an ocean of calm. I like the idea because I expect that as Winnie grows older, she will have to spend a lot of time alone. What better place to be alone than in the woods? A big black wolf/dog cross will be a powerful deterrent to any human or animal that she encounters that has nasty intentions."

  "Do wolves have emotions?" Doc asked. "Won't she read those too?"

  "We're hoping that they don't. If they do, we're hoping that Winnie can't read them."

  "Any chance that Winnie will learn how to turn off the noise?" Doc asked.

  "No success finding a switch yet. Yolanda says that she received her own powers when she was about 10 and learned quickly how to control the experience. We're trying mental thought commands right now. Physical movements haven't worked. Winnie's premature birth might be a factor and, if so, . . ." Hank shrugged.

  "I don't know where to find research on this," Doc said. "Psychic powers are not well understood."

  "Many people have heard voices in their head over the centuries," Hank added. "They ended up in insane asylums. Granny and Yolanda fear that if Winnie can't find a way to manage the noise, it will drive her mad. There's a history of that in the family – a toddler who was too young to explain what was happening to her."

  # # # # # # # #

  From Izzy's journals: Monday, August 8.

  Yollie had insisted on coming with me on my scouting trip to Alaska; she said it was her job to protect me. I tried to argue; didn't work; turned out to be OK actually. She was good company. We talked about Winnie and her pup. I don't think I'd like a dog that was solid black. It's scary looking. Yollie's more of a cat person, she said. Can't stand the things, myself. Always licking themselves. Yuck.

  Yollie said that it was Will who had stopped Winnie and Yolanda from fighting. He knocked on Winnie's bedroom door, poked his head in, and said that Winnie had been making her drawings at the same time that he was studying the bot. Mother realized that Winnie hadn't snitched the bot to make the drawings like she had thought. Then she started asking other questions. Something is going on about Winnie that nobody is talking about. I tried to open that door with Yollie but she changed the subject.

  Yollie was happy enough to talk about TG. She told me that he's good with the four IOF babies and is babysitting them most of the day now. TG doesn't claim that changing a diaper is an unsolvable mystery. That's what dissident men did. The women would do all the work; as a reward, men would hit them if the baby woke them up. TG likes the babies because he really misses his own daughter, according to Yollie. I kept my mouth shut.

  Yollie couldn't tell TG why I had wanted to look at his home village because I didn't tell her. I still don't trust her to watch her mouth around TG. Frankly, I don't trust him. If I were a guy and I wanted a woman to think good things about me, first thing I'd do is cuddle a baby. Better still – I'd offer to change the diaper. So far, I haven't been able to confirm a single thing about his story. I have six possible plans. Five of them involve having a loyal TG helping us. If I can't find something that supports his claims soon, we'll go with Plan #6 with its higher risk and lower probability of success. I wasn't expecting this trip to his village to help; it was mostly desperation. Perhaps we'd see a sign over a house in the village: Ivan's daughter is being kept in this house. Rescuers, please enter by the back door.

  We found TG's village easily. There was only one village facing the Beaufort Sea that was at the end of an old highway ending at an old oil terminal. TG had said that The Citadel had an effective military presence at the terminal what with all the oil being shipped out. So Yollie and I approached at very high altitude and from the vast expanse of the Artic Ocean. I had the ship's long-range telescope in my sling; Yollie had a suite of long range filament sensors in hers. We stopped when Yollie's sensors started blinking, retreated to where they didn't blink, and hovered in place. All we saw was a sleepy little village and what looked like an abandoned oil terminal. But Yollie found electronic signals buzzing all around. I decided to stay for a while.

  While Yollie tried to pinpoint the sources of the electronics, I took long looks at the village through the telescope. It had one main street with plenty of shops; a school; some big buildings that could be housing anything; a cluster of houses at both ends of the village, an old airport with a usable runway; an airport terminal building with what looked to be a giant wire dish on top of it; and a series of buildings that had the appearance of mass accommodations but they were plopped into the ground in the middle of nowhere. I also saw a few pedestrians with white skin.

  The terminal looked old and unused. I saw lines of circular storage tanks; some cranes; electrical transmission towers; and a lot of different shaped buildings scattered around the terminal. Many of them had antennas or more of the wire dishes on top of them. No signs of humans. But the dishes on top of the buildings were rotating. "Are the electronics coming from the dishes?" I asked Yollie.

  "Too far away to be sure," she said. "Do you want to move closer? I wouldn't recommend it."

  "Let's stay where we are. It's enough to know that a desolate looking area has electronic signals cluttering up the air."

  # # # # # # # #

  After an hour, I sensed that Yollie was becoming impatient. Other than increased traffic through what I thought was the village's grocery store, I had nothing new to report. We had run out of things to talk about. I had already snuck in my question about why TG could look so perfectly brown when he was actually white. I told her that I was interested because Zzyk had appeared like that too but I knew that his skin colour and the nose were faked. Yollie said she'd ask TG how they had made him permanently brown.

  The appearance of a large vehicle coming out of an underground storage area beneath one of the accommodation buildings caught our attention. Long and tubular in shape. Small windows along the sides; big window at the front. Looked like an old fashioned bus. A second bus emerged and followed the first. Both had huge wheels to keep their undercarriages high off the ground. I found it hard to imagine snow reaching that high, but figured that it could this far north.

  The busses weren't solar powered; had to be gasoline or diesel. They wound their way into the middle of the terminal grounds and stopped. People appeared out of one of the busses and milled around. I counted perhaps 20-25. All with white faces; all wearing what seemed to be the same uniform. "Military personnel," I told Yollie who couldn't see the detail I could.

  Then, lines of people emerged from the buildings surrounding the busses. I saw four concealed doors and one hidden underground ramp that hadn't been visible before. White faces in uniforms were everywhere. I tried to get a count before the two groups merged together. Perhaps 50 coming out; 25 going in? "Shift change," I said to Yollie.

  "6
p.m. local time," she replied.

  The reason for the second bus now became clear as the uniforms lined up in front of both busses, entered, and then they were returned to the accommodation buildings where the busses disappeared underground without letting their passengers out.

  "Barracks," Yollie suggested.

  "With underground tunnels linking them together so that nobody has to walk outside in the winter," I agreed. "The night shift is smaller than the day shift," I added.

  "Four more vehicles are approaching. I didn't catch where they came from."

  "Me neither." It took me a couple of seconds to refocus the telescope. "Typical Army trucks; they run on gas or diesel. Bodies are jumping out of the back now."

  I saw about forty uniforms lined up in military formation and then they split into five groups and each group was marched to one of the five hidden entrances. Two men in different uniforms accompanied each group. I focused tightly on the forty people and finally saw what I expected to see.

  "Soldiers?" Yollie asked?

  "Prisoners," I said. Probably to clean the facilities during the night shift. The soldiers leading them have weapons of some kind. The men in formation are chained."

  "Interesting," Yollie said.

  "You don't know the half of it," I replied. "Most of the prisoners have brown faces. I bet they have Alberta noses too."

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  Chapter 20

  Hank plopped his newest peddler wagon full of trade goods onto the Wilizy's stern deck and then Yolanda took the youngsters on a scenic cruise to Chicago. They had never seen flat prairie land before so she gave them a low-level flight that would allow them to see the geographical features on the trip. They landed at Chicago's end of Lake Michigan – the dry end. The lake still held a vast quantity of fresh water, but none near Chicago.

  Will and Doc were visiting England's Oxford University. Izzy had wanted Will to go to Chicago too, but she could feel the time slipping away and so accepted the heavy little box that Will had given her to bring back some pebbles and his assurances that the box would keep the pebbles from affecting the ship. Hank was expanding his collection of peddler wagons again. The wagon they'd be using in Chicago was the latest to come out of Alberta's new wagon building industry. If one little shop can be considered an industry. Still, the owner had good woodworking skills and he had enough people asking for a wagon that he was earning a steady income in the form of trade goods.