by Blake Banner
She stared at me, hard. Outside, I heard the Sheriff’s truck and knew he was going to Smith and Jones’ cabin. Her eyes shifted over my shoulder and then back to my face.
“You’re an asshole,” she said simply and went into the kitchen. I took my coffee outside and sat on the porch to watch the activity at the deceased duo’s dwelling.
After ten minutes, the Sheriff came out and talked on the radio. I figured he was calling for a meat wagon. After a moment he hung up, saw me and walked over with the measured steps of a genuine Wyatt Earp, hitching up his trousers over his belly as he went.
I watched him climb the steps and stand looking down at me.
“Good morning, Sheriff. Have some coffee?”
“You still here, huh?”
“I find the air stimulating.”
“You have anything to do with any of this?”
“Any of what, Sheriff? Are you here about the explosion up the road? That fair shook the windows.” I smiled amiably.
He narrowed his eyes in a way he thought was menacing and nodded. “So far we found four legs and three hands. So at least two men were killed by that explosion…”
“That seems arithmetically sound.”
“Don’t get smart with me, son.”
“Were they playing with explosives? Perhaps it was a terrorist cell. This could be a career-defining moment for you, Sheriff.”
He pointed over at the cabin. “Two fellers in that cabin came here looking for you. This morning they show up dead.”
I shook my head. “That was a mistake. Blueberry thought it was me they were looking for, but it turned out to be somebody else.” I made a face like I was concerned. “How did they die?”
He pointed a sausage-finger at me. “I have my eye on you, Walker. You better watch your step.”
I smiled. “Only malefactors fear the eye of the law, Sheriff. The righteous need never hide from it. Amen.”
He pushed into the diner and the door banged behind him. I sipped my coffee and ran over things in my mind again. If I was right, Maddox would be there within the hour.
As it was, he was there within the half hour. He arrived in a black limo with tinted windows. His driver opened the back door for him and he stepped out, buttoning his Italian jacket. He glanced at me, climbed the stairs and pushed into the diner with his driver behind him. I knew what was coming next, and I was right. Ten minutes later, the driver stepped out again. He was big, with a barrel chest and a thick neck. He stood in front of me like a statue of the Buddha on a bad hair day and said, “Mr. Maddox wants to see you.”
I blinked at him a few times to show I was a little confused.
“OK...”
He frowned. “Inside.”
“No, see, I’m out here. If he wants to see me, he’s going to have to come outside.”
His big face hardened. “He wants to see you inside.”
I watched him but I didn’t answer. The door opened and the sheriff leaned out. “Walker. Get your ass in here. Mr. Maddox wants to talk to you.”
I shifted my gaze from the gorilla to the sheriff. “No.”
I heard a chair scrape inside and angry feet striding across the wooden floor. Maddox pushed past the sheriff. He stood next to his driver and squinted down at me, somewhere between being mad and being curious.
“You are playing a very stupid game, Walker.” I frowned down at my coffee. He went on. “I know why you are here, and you better believe me when I tell you, it is in your best interest to cooperate with me, because neither you nor that bitch have a chance in hell of getting away with this.”
I looked up. “With what, Maddox?”
The sheriff snarled, “That’s Mr. Maddox to you, Walker!”
I stood and stepped real close to Maddox. “Let me make a couple of things clear to you, Maddox. First, I am not playing. Whatever reason I am here, is real. It is no game. Second, I have no idea in what ways you think we can cooperate, but threatening me is not the way to get my cooperation. Threats make me kind of crazy. And third, I don’t know what bitch you’re referring to. As far as I am aware, your wife is still in bed, where I left her.”
The big gorilla didn’t so much telegraph the punch as give a month’s notice that it was coming. It was easy to block and get right inside his guard, where I slammed my fist down hard onto his belly, just bellow his solar plexus. The combined weight of the punch and his gut dragged down his diaphragm, winded him and drained all the blood from his head. He made a noise like a car with a dying battery and collapsed on the decking.
The sheriff fumbled for his .38. I gave him the dead eye and spoke quietly. “You un-holster that, Sheriff, you better kill me.”
You could see the math going on in his brain. Two at the shack, two in the cabin, three maimed and one dead the night before. His odds didn’t look so great. Maddox put a hand on the sheriff’s arm. The sheriff looked relieved.
“All right, Mitch, let’s not escalate this.” He sighed. “Walker, all I want to do is talk to you…”
“So talk. I’m right here and I’m listening. What do you want?”
“You know what I want. I want the girl.”
I shrugged. “What girl?”
He was getting antsy again. “You know what girl, Walker! And you know that I know! I can make this worth your while!”
I smiled in a way that was amiable. “Gee, Sheriff, I honestly think you have me confused with somebody else.”
His face flushed and made him look like a beetroot in an Armani suit. “I am warning you, Walker. You may be good at what you do, but you are taking on more than you understand. I want your cooperation to find this slut, but if I can’t get it, your life isn’t worth a damn! I will hunt you both down and I will kill you both.”
I looked at the sheriff. “I am going to give you a chance, Sheriff. I have been attacked, and I have just been threatened with death. Are you going to arrest this man?”
Sheriff Hanafin sneered. “Get real, Walker.”
I looked back at Maddox. “So we are operating outside the law?”
He shook his head. “A different law, Walker. My law.”
The driver was staggering to his feet, leaning on the handrail. He turned to me and his chin and his shirt were smeared with vomit.
I said, “Friend, get out of here, because next time we meet I will kill you.” I turned back to the Sheriff. “For you and this clown, there is no escape, Sheriff. Before thirty-six hours are up, you’ll both be dead.”
I saw fear in their eyes.
Maddox started to talk. “You are making a big mistake…”
I silenced him. “I am going to bring destruction and devastation to you, Maddox, on a scale you can’t imagine. And then, when you see the ruins of everything you have done around you, I will kill you.”
They fumbled down the steps. Maddox and his driver clambered into their limo, and the sheriff went at a shambling run across the dirt road toward his pick-up. The lines were drawn. Now I had to prepare. I turned to go inside. Blueberry was standing in the doorway, watching me.
“You’re out of your mind,” she said.
I said, “Go home.”
Eleven
I watched the ME, the ambulance and the sheriff drive off in a convoy. It had never been his intention to arrest me. If it had been, he’d have deputized a dozen of Maddox’s men and taken me in, dead or alive. Besides, he had no hard evidence against me that would stand up in a court of law. No, the sheriff had been told to beat it and let Maddox take care of things.
When they’d gone, I had a bite to eat and told Blueberry to get together some bread and cheese. I added that to my kit bag. I figured the farm was about one and a half or two miles away as the crow flies. The outlying fields, which were what interested me right then, might be a bit closer than that. The terrain was rough and hilly, so I was going to allow myself a couple of hours to get there.
At two o’clock, I slung my bag over my shoulder and stepped out onto the porch. Blueberry c
ame out after me.
“Lacklan, just get in your car and go.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You’re really crazy about her, huh?”
I shook my head. “That isn’t an option.”
“She’s a lucky girl.”
“Not really.”
“You know you’re going to get killed, don’t you?”
“It’s possible.”
“I’ll miss you.”
I gave her a kiss. “I don’t want to find you here when I get back. Go home.”
She looked me in the eye. “I told you. That’s not how we do things in these parts.”
I turned and walked away. I didn’t follow the road. I went to the back of the diner and headed northeast, sticking to the woodland and keeping below the high ground. It was warm and the going was heavy and slow. There were lots of hills and the land was covered in loose rocks, stones and sand. After an hour, I crested a high escarpment with large boulders at the top. I knew from this point the ground gradually sloped away toward the farm.
I clambered to the top of the highest boulder and lay on my belly, looking toward where I knew the farm was. Despite its size, it took me a while to make out the hangar. The dirty sage green was a perfect match for the environment it was in. Once I had it, I began to make out the enclosure, and then the fields to the west. I adjusted my binoculars and had a closer look. The area they covered was vast. Several hectares. And the trucks were still on their non-stop routine, going to the fields, collecting the plants and delivering them to the hangar. From where I was lying, about a mile distant, it was hard to be sure, but the operation seemed to be mainly mechanized. As I had noticed the night before, there didn’t seem to be many people involved.
I ate a piece of bread and some cheese and kept going, bearing west toward the fields that lay furthest from the enclosure. Now the going was slower and more difficult, because as I drew closer, the risk of being seen was proportionally greater. The need to stay low among the sparse trees was greater with every hundred paces I took.
Finally, after another hour, as the sun was beginning to slip from the zenith, I scrambled to the top of a wooded slope and peered over the edge. I was ten or twelve paces from the electrified fence, and immediately beyond it was a dense field of fifteen foot sunflowers. They were arranged in rows, each about forty-five to fifty feet across, separated by dirt tracks about the width of a truck. A little distance away, I could hear the grinding of a diesel engine in low gear.
But there was another sound too, a buzzing that could have been bees or cicadas, but wasn’t. It was coming from in among the sunflowers, and as I peered closer I realized that the plants were swarming with small, golden beetles. I listened a little longer and realized that the sound of the diesel engine was not moving. Whatever it was doing, it was doing it in one place.
I slipped over the top of the hill, ran and leapt for the top of the nearest post, using the rubber soles of my boots to keep me away from the electrified wires. I pulled myself up, rolled over and landed on my feet on the other side. I knew I had a couple of minutes at best before guards showed up to check the fence. I sprinted down the path between the sunflower plantations, toward the sound of the truck. There was a T-junction up ahead and the noise was coming from the left branch.
I skidded around and stopped. It looked like a seven-ton open truck with a mechanical arm. The arm was reaching out and ripping up ‘handfuls’ of plants, then dumping them in the back of the vehicle. There was a guy in a yellow safety helmet with his back to me, holding a wireless controller and smoking a cigarette. I glanced up at the cab. There was nobody else in it. He was on his own.
I didn’t think. I pulled the knife from my boot and I was on him in two silent strides. In the movies, you always see them grab the guy’s forehead and cut from left to right, dragging the blade across the throat. That’s the wrong way. You grip the mouth and nose with your left hand, and you push the knife in on the right side of the neck. You push in hard and slice out, severing the jugular and the trachea, and you virtually decapitate him at the same time. He loses consciousness and bleeds out in a matter of seconds. That’s what this guy did.
I took his helmet and his wireless controller. I used it to make the mechanical arm pick him up and dump him in the field among the sunflowers and the bugs. The truck looked just about full so I clambered in the cab and drove off in the direction of the compound, with my kit bag on the seat beside me. As I moved along, a Jeep sped past in the opposite direction with two armed guards in it. I smiled to myself. Another damned coyote.
It was a half-mile drive. The dirt tracks were on a grid system, so it was pretty simple. Here and there I saw trucks ripping up flowers and dumping them in their containers at the back. In other parts I saw machines that seemed to be plowing and planting at the same time.
Eventually, I came to the enclosure. I figured the double barbed-wire fence was about fifteen feet high, topped with a coil of razor wire. I pulled up at a big gate with a hut in front. There were two guards armed with automatic weapons. They were wearing military fatigues and they had a military look and feel about them. You develop an instinct over time, and these guys were not paramilitary. I was prepared to lay money that they were the real thing.
One of them squinted in at me and said, “Where’s Jim? This is Jim’s truck.”
I shrugged like I didn’t give a damn. “He got sick. I was sent to replace him.”
“Why weren’t we notified?”
I gave him a look that told him I didn’t need his problems. “Ask someone who gives a fuck, pal. I do what I’m told.”
He opened the gate and I watched him in the mirror to see what he did. He looked at me disappear for a bit, then went to talk to his pal. He didn’t get on the radio, and that was a good thing.
As I drove on toward the hangar, I tried to get a look at the green huts and see what was under the plastic sheets, but there wasn’t much to see, just tinted windows and a bit of foliage. I wound on past the huts and crossed a large esplanade where the vast doors of the hangar yawned open into a dark, impenetrable interior.
I slowed and moved in at a crawl. I saw a guy ahead beckoning me forward with his hands and glancing to the side occasionally. Then he told me to halt and gave me the thumbs up.
I didn’t know if I was supposed to stay in the cab or not. I killed the engine and he turned and walked away. I grabbed my bag, opened the cab door and jumped out.
As I stood and watched, I realized that I was not in a warehouse. I was in a processing plant. My truck was being unloaded by another mechanical arm which was dumping the sunflower plants onto a conveyor belt, which in turn was carrying them towards a kind of vast grinding machine, like a giant micer. From the other end, a tube carried the resulting pulp deeper into the hangar, where it seemed to be mixed with other ingredients from hoppers overhead. That was what I could see at a glance. There were practically no people here, but I knew if I stood staring I was bound to attract somebody’s attention. So I moved on. Besides, I needed to get rid of my kit bag somewhere.
And as I wondered what to do next, I saw a guy in a white lab coat with a clipboard striding toward me. He was frowning. I bent my knees a couple of times, spat on the floor and went and stood in the doorway to light a cigarette.
“Hey, you!”
I turned and gave him a ‘fuck you’ look.
He said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get in your cab and get this damn truck out of here!”
A foreman. You got to love a foreman. I gave him a once-over and said, “It ain’t empty yet.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
I looked conciliatory and said, “C’mere. Have a look.”
I beckoned him over to the back of the truck, had a quick look around, saw nobody was looking and smashed his head against the container. I put on his coat and hauled him onto the conveyor, then picked up his clipboard and slung my bag in the corner under the belt. As I strolled
back the way he had come, I saw his foot disappearing into the grinder, to be masticated by the jaws of impermanence.
I looked at the paper on the clipboard. It didn’t make a lot of sense. Some figures were in tons, which I assumed referred to the sunflowers. Other figures referred to units and lots, but of what was impossible to tell.
A sudden thought made me stop in my tracks and I walked back toward the area where the gigantic flowers were being loaded onto the conveyor belt. I went up close and peered at the plants. As in the field, they were swarming with the small, golden bugs. Whatever the pulp was for, it was not just sunflower pulp. It was sunflower and bug pulp.
I walked on. The guy who had guided me in appeared from across the floor, coming at a run. Another truck was approaching outside.
“Where the fuck is Jim? Get this fuckin’ truck outa here! Jim! Where the fuck is Jim? Jim!”
I strolled on. I was in a white coat. He couldn’t even see me.
The tube carrying the bug and sunflower sludge disappeared through a wall. There was a door in that wall that said, ‘Authorized Personnel Only’. I had a white coat, so I figured that made me authorized personnel. I opened the door and stepped through. It was a small office. There was a guy at a desk writing at a computer. Another door in the far wall beckoned me, so I ignored the guy and crossed the room. He ignored me back.
The next room was a vast hall with a high ceiling, a steel staircase and a galleried landing at the top with a row of offices. There was a deafening noise of machines, rattling like old steam engines, coming from a complex assembly line which ran the length of two walls. I traced the pipe out of the wall and saw it fed into the end of that assembly line. They were making something out of the bug and sunflower pulp. I was curious to know what.
There were more people here, too, dressed in blue overalls with white helmets.
The blast of a horn made me look. Somebody heaved up a steel roller blind, letting in the glare of the afternoon sun and a small, reversing container truck. It stopped by a large stack of cardboard boxes and two guys started loading the boxes into the container. I strolled over, checking my clipboard, like I had something comprehensible there to look at. I glanced back the boxes. They were about two and a half feet square and had blue writing on the side. It read HEALTHFIX™.