by Blake Banner
I knew they hadn’t called Maddox because there was no cell reception up here, and I had taken the precaution of cutting their phone lines. So I knew I wasn’t going to get any unwelcome visitors. When I was satisfied there was nobody watching, I ran the remaining thirty yards to the back of the house. There were no lights in the kitchen, and the spare key was where I had left it, under a rock by the door. I let myself in and stood listening.
They were watching TV in the living room. I pulled the Sig from my belt. My plan was to take out Smith with a double tap, neutralize Jones and interrogate him. I moved down the short passage, braced myself outside the door and moved to kick it in, holding the Sig out in front of me in both hands.
Then everything went wrong at the same time. A loud voice boomed, “I’m famished. You want something to eat?” At the same time, the door wrenched open and my foot kicked empty air. I over-balanced and stumbled forward. For a fraction of a second I saw Jones, a couple of feet away, gawping at me. Past him, sitting in an armchair, Smith was staring in astonishment.
I tried to swing the weapon around toward Jones, but his massive fist smashed into my face and sent me staggering back against the wall, dazed and stunned, with the room spinning and rocking underneath me. Next thing he had me by the scruff of my neck and was dragging me to my feet. I swung the Sig toward his belly but he grabbed my wrist, bellowing at Smith to come help him.
His mistake was not to finish me immediately. He gave me those precious seconds for the adrenaline to kick in. And by then it was too late. He had my right wrist and my throat in his massive hands. He thought he had enough time for Smith to come and help him. He didn’t. I pulled myself in close with my right arm and slammed my left fist into his floating ribs. He was tough and I knew he wouldn’t let go. But all I wanted was for him to loosen his grip on my wrist. He did. I angled the automatic down and put two slugs into his leg. He screamed and fell.
Smith was behind him. He lashed out with his foot and he was a lot faster than I had expected. He knocked the gun from my hand and as he landed, he pounded my belly with four powerful punches that almost knocked the wind out of me. His fifth was with his fingertips and aimed at my throat. It would have killed me.
I dodged left so the blow flashed over my right shoulder, and slammed the heel of my hand into his chin. He staggered back two steps and hit the door frame. Jones was still sobbing on the floor. Smith was dazed and I saw his next move coming. Tae Kwon Do was his style, and as I came at him he lunged into a front kick which would have ruptured my liver. Instead I lifted my knee to deflect the blow, and as I did so I slipped the fighting knife from my boot. He landed from the kick already drawing back his fist, but by that time the six-inch, double-edged blade was already deep in his heart. He quivered and spasmed, and blood gurgled from his mouth. I let him slip off the blade to slump on the floor and turned to look at Jones.
“You fucked up every step of the way, Mr. Jones.”
He was sobbing. I hunkered down beside him.
“I can stop the bleeding and get you to a doctor in Salida in about twenty minutes. You might lose the leg, you might not. But if I don’t get you there, you will bleed out in about ten to fifteen. You going to talk to me?”
He nodded. “Please help me.”
“How did you find me?”
“A tracker.”
“Where?”
“In your kit bag.”
“How?”
“Your dad’s man, Ben.”
“What is Maddox doing?”
“I don’t know, man. It’s nothing to do with us. We were just sent to get the girl.”
“Who by?”
“Maddox.”
“So Maddox is part of Omega?”
“Yeah, I thought you knew that! Come on man, I’m dying here!”
“Who is Maddox’s boss?”
“I don’t know! We are just hired muscle, man!”
I nodded and stood. I went into the living room where the TV was playing a repeat of an ancient sitcom. Smith’s Glock was on the coffee table. I picked it up with my handkerchief and carried it over to where Smith was lying. I fitted it into his right hand and placed his finger on the trigger. Jones was staring at me. I said, “Wrong answer,” and shot him through the heart.
I dug out my two 9mm slugs from his leg and put them in my pocket. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t have a CSI team running ballistics on these two, but it pays to be careful. I didn’t know if Sheriff Hanafin was Maddox’s man or not. But if he wasn’t, all he was going to see was the ugly result of a brawl between two hunters. He would investigate no further.
If he was Maddox’s man, then it made no difference. He’d know who’d done it, ballistics or not. And if he was Maddox’s man, I wanted him to know.
I took the keys to the Jeep, made my way back to the diner and climbed the stairs to my room. I emptied out my kit bag on the bed and went through my clothes and my weapons one by one. I didn’t find the tracking device. I opened the Velcro flaps and pulled out the arrows. It was in the third arrow pocket - a small disk stuck to the canvas.
I sat looking at it a while, wondering if only Smith and Jones had been receiving its signal or whether it was transmitting to somebody else as well. There was no way of being sure, but there was an at least even chance whoever was running the Armani Hunters, whoever had instructed Ben to place the transmitter in my bag, was also receiving the signal.
I lit a cigarette and sat thinking about my next move. For a moment I had the impulse to go to the cabin and grab Marni. I knew I could do it, and I knew she’d be there. But I dismissed the idea. She didn’t want me to find her yet. She wanted me to go after the Farm and Maddox. That much was clear to me now, and if that was what she wanted, she must have her reasons.
I took a spare magazine for the Sig, cleaned my knife, put it back in my boot, and broke off a chunk of C4. I also put an M5 detonator in my pocket. The night-vision goggles were still around my neck. I knew what I had to do, and I knew where to do it.
I went back out and found Jones and Smith’s Jeep. The moon, in its last waxing, was just rising over the mountains. I climbed in to the truck, fired up the big V6 and drove half a mile out of town along North Spring Road. There was a derelict shack out there that was going to serve my purpose. I didn’t try to be silent or keep hidden. If anyone was watching or listening, I wanted them to know where I was going.
I found the place and came off the road, bumped up the track for a hundred yards, and finally came to a stop outside the old semi-ruin. The door was unlocked and I went inside. Thin moonlight was filtering in through the dirty glass in the windows. I pulled out my pencil flashlight and played the beam around the room. There wasn’t much there, save a pot-bellied stove and a rocking chair.
I returned to the door and wedged it closed. Using my knife, I levered up one of the floorboards and placed the C4 beneath it, with the tracking device tucked into it. I stabbed in the detonator, connected it to the handle of the door and replaced the floorboard. The next person to open that door would bring the house down.
I let myself out through the bedroom window and returned to the Jeep. I was smiling. As I climbed behind the wheel, I thought of Marni, of her goodness. I wondered for a moment, had I lost my humanity? I decided I hadn’t, but like I said, I was working on it.
Nine
I bumped and ground my way back down the track and turned north at the end. Now I left the headlamps off and relied on the rising moon to find my way. There was no blacktop to reflect the light. I had to follow the ghostly ribbon of pale earth that lay between the shrubs and sparse woodland.
I drove slowly, keeping my eyes focused ahead and to the left, where Blueberry had said the farm would be. After three or four minutes the road turned west and all I could see ahead was the dark forms of the trees looming at the sides of the road, and the black silhouette of the mountains ahead. I kept going for another five minutes, crawling at ten or fifteen MPH, scanning for any sign of cultivation, lig
hts, anything that might suggest a farm.
I didn’t see anything until the road turned north again after about a mile. Then I began to make out what looked like tall fenceposts. I slowed and pulled over. They were barely visible, but they were there, about thirty feet back from the road. I killed the engine and jumped down. On closer inspection I saw that the posts, about a foot square and seven feet high, had a wire mesh strung across them, and a little experimentation with my knife showed the mesh was electrically charged.
I returned to the Jeep and tucked it behind some trees on the far side of the road, then fitted the night vision goggles and returned at a lope to the fence. There I lay in the dry grass, twenty feet back, and waited. They came after ten minutes, black silhouettes against an eerie green backlight, driving an open top Wrangler. There were two of them and they were armed with automatic rifles. They parked with their headlamps on full beam aimed at the spot where I had held the knife against the wires with my boot and walked over to examine it. One of the two guys hunkered down to look at the wires. His eyes shone green where the headlamps reflected off them. I heard him say, “Probably just a coyote, or a fuckin’ jackrabbit. The mesh ain’t busted.”
The other muttered something and I saw green mist rise from his mouth where he had a cigarette dangling. They withdrew, climbed back in the Wrangler and drove away. I gave them five minutes and began to walk along the edge of the fence, taking my time, looking for some place where it could be breached.
I didn’t find one, but after a while I began to see light filtering up from behind a line of trees, maybe a quarter of a mile away. I figured that must be the main building of the farm. I walked for another ten minutes and up ahead, I started to make out a small construction. It was maybe thirty or forty yards away and there was a faint luminescence coming off it. I dropped on my belly and began to crawl. At fifteen yards, I could see that it was a guard’s hut, and it was attached to a large, metal gate.
I thought about taking out the guard and going in that way, but it presented too many obstacles, so I turned back the way I had come. The impression I had was that they didn’t want visitors, but neither did they really expect them. The fence was less of an obstacle than a deterrent. Most of the people in the neighborhood worked here anyway, according to Blueberry. It seemed to me they just wanted to put off any nosey hikers or teens from coming in and snooping.
I got back to the Jeep, climbed in and drove it slowly to within an inch of the nearest post. Then I climbed on the hood and vaulted over the fence into the grounds of the farm. Getting out again would not be a problem, as long as I didn’t get caught.
I set off at a rifleman’s run, ten paces walking, ten paces running, toward a large hill about a quarter of a mile away. Behind it I could see the faint glow I had seen earlier. Every now and then I would catch a waft of sound on the breeze, like heavy trucks moving, or heavy machinery. A couple of times I dropped to the ground because I thought I heard a Jeep, but I managed to reach the bottom of the hill without being seen.
By now the glow behind the hill was intense, and the sound of machinery was distinct and clear. There were diesel engines at work there. I ran the forty yards to the top and dropped on my belly to crawl the last few feet to the rim.
I don’t know what I had expected to see, but it was not what I saw. What I saw was a military installation. It was vast. At a guess I figured it was two or three hundred yards long, and about the same across, which put it in the region of five to seven hectares. It was surrounded by a double barbed wire fence, with eight towers—one at each corner and one in the middle of each fence. I could see men with automatic weapons and dogs patrolling the space between the fences, and two armed guards in each of the towers. They appeared to be wearing military fatigues.
In the center of the square there were prefabricated structures, two stories high and painted a dull green color, standing at right angles to each other, forming smaller squares, perhaps forty yards across. These areas were covered in white plastic sheets. The whole thing was floodlit as bright as day, but apart from the guards on the perimeter fence, I saw practically no people.
The far north end of the enclosure was at the foot of a cliff, where the ground rose suddenly toward one of the mountain peaks. There, annexed to the camp, was a vast hangar, painted the same ugly sage green as the huts. It was hard to estimate its size from that distance, but it was at least thirty to forty yards across and the height of an apartment block. As I watched, I heard an engine from the southwestern side. When I looked, I saw a couple of guards opening a gate to allow a truck to come in. It was loaded with what looked like sunflowers. I heard the gears grind and it made its way through the compound, and eventually through the doors of the hangar.
I stared past the gates into the shadows beyond. The glare from the installation below made it hard to see, but as I shielded my eyes I gradually became aware, in the moonlight, that there were acres of fields, stretching as far as the eye could see. Fields of what, in that poor visibility, looked like sunflowers.
I stayed another half hour, watching, and in that time another three trucks rolled in, each loaded with sunflowers.
I slid back down the hill and set off toward the outer fence at a steady jog. In the strange, turquoise light of the moon, it took me ten minutes to cover the distance back to the Jeep. As I approached the fencepost, I accelerated to a sprint, then jumped. The only thing I had to be careful of was to touch the fence only with the soles of my boots. It was two steps, and then grab the top of the post with my hands. I levered myself up and jumped down onto the hood of the Jeep.
I was certain I had set off an alarm, but by the time they got there I would be long gone. Another damn coyote.
As I drove away I poked a Camel in my mouth, flipped my Zippo and leaned in to the flame, thinking about sunflowers. What the hell would make anybody guard sunflowers with soldiers and barbed wire? What did sunflowers have that was so valuable?
But even as I was thinking, crawling my way along the luminous dust path, I knew it was not just the sunflowers. Because you could get millions of tons of sunflowers anywhere you liked where there was sun. Which meant that the sunflowers they were growing here were special in some way. So the question was, what made these sunflowers special?
A: they were genetically modified in some way, or B: they processed them in some way in the complex or in the hangar, or both. That might make sense the complex was more heavily guarded than the fields.
So now the question became, what were they doing to the sunflowers in the complex and in the hangar? And as far as I could tell, there was only one way to find out.
I left the Jeep outside Smith and Jones’ cabin and walked back to the diner. I let myself in and took a bottle of Irish from behind the bar. I sat at a table with it and smoked and drank and thought. Maddox and his farm were part of Omega, but only part. I knew the operation was bigger, and Maddox had bosses above him. I had to use him to get to them.
They had sent men with guns after me and Marni. Now I would take blood, fire and destruction to them.
I didn’t sleep. Eventually I went upstairs and lay on the bed, waiting for morning. I saw the translucent light of the moon change through my open window to the grim, gray light of dawn. No trucks rolled in at six for early breakfast. At seven, I went down and made coffee and toast and took it out on the porch to wait. At eight, Blueberry arrived in her Toyota. She climbed out and stood looking at me. She looked scared.
“What did you do, Lacklan?”
I raised my cup. “I made coffee.”
She climbed the steps, went inside, and started setting up shop.
At half past eight, the explosion tore through the morning, scattered birds screaming into the sky, made the windows rattle, sent splintered wood, shards of glass and bits of human body two hundred feet up into the air, to rain down on the town from a mushroom cloud of dust and smoke that would linger over Turret like a ghost for the rest of the day.
Blueberry cam
e rushing out into the street to stare up at the sky. Then she stared at me. I was smiling. The war had begun. I am good at war. War is what I do best.
Ten
The sheriff arrived an hour later with two deputies. Blueberry had a shed around back and I had asked her to let me put the Zombie in there, to keep her out of sight and charge her up. I was coming back from doing that when I saw the sheriff’s Ford pick-up speed toward the smoldering remains of the booby-trapped cabin.
I climbed the steps to the porch and went inside. It was dark after the glare of the morning sun. Blueberry was sitting on a stool at the bar with a beam of dusty light illuminating her face. She didn’t look happy.
“Who are you? Why are you here?”
“It’s best you don’t know.” I went behind the counter and poured myself a coffee. “Things are going to get pretty ugly in the next couple of days. You’d be best staying at home.”
“That’s not how we do things ’round here. You don’t run away just coz things get tough.”
I carried my coffee to the window and stood looking out. They’d be coming soon. She spoke behind me. She sounded mad, resentful.
“My parents opened this business. Who’s going to compensate them for the money they’re going to lose?”
I answered without turning. “I’m sorry about that. I’ll see what I can do.”
“That’s how it is with you, huh? Walk in, use people, kill people, destroy things… ‘Sorry about that,’ and walk away…”
“I guess so.” I turned to face her. “I can’t explain to you what’s going on, Blueberry. All I can tell you is that these are very dangerous people. If you stay, your life is at risk, and I don’t want you to get hurt.”