by Bobby Akart
“Remember the bare bodkin? Quietus?”
Barb’s mind raced, searching for a response to his statement. She knew the phrase well, as it had been a frequent topic of conversation over a glass of wine at home.
Where is he going with this?
“Of course, dear,” she finally responded. “We’ve debated what that line meant for years.”
“Yes,” said Tommy with a slight whisper.
She sat up in the chair and recited the line. “When he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin. We agreed the bare bodkin referred to a dagger. Quietus meant—” Barb abruptly stopped mid-sentence. He wants to quit, or kill himself.
Tommy nodded and looked directly at her eyes, mustering up the courage and strength to speak.
“Yes. Barb, I don’t want to burden you. I want to go. Please help me go.”
Chapter 4
Day Seventy-Nine
The Quarantine House
Quandary Peak
“Those were his exact words,” started Mac. “Please help me go.”
“Yes,” said Barb, who’d just finished crying in Mac’s arms.
After Barb got Tommy to sleep, she called from the checkpoint for Hunter to join her. Janie volunteered to suit up and join Tommy and Flatus to monitor their conditions. After a brief conversation with Hunter, he hustled up the ridge to retrieve Mac from the lab.
Just as the conversation was getting started, Doc Cooley arrived to check on his old friend. They brought him up to speed on Tommy’s condition over the last twenty-four hours. He offered to examine Tommy, but they all agreed to allow their beloved patient the opportunity to rest.
“Mom, what does he want to do, commit suicide? Is he giving up on me?” asked Mac as she started to get emotional. For days, she’d kept her composure around everyone except when she released her true emotions around Hunter. But this was too much for her.
“Dear, don’t assume that,” replied Barb. “Your father was feeling remorseful because he believes he’s leaving us in a world with his burdens. He’ll be all right later.”
Mac walked away and ran her hand through her hair. She had to put her emotions away and consider her father’s feelings for a minute. She rejoined the group, who had been watching her.
“No, I’m sorry, Mom. The truth is we all know that Daddy will not be all right later. Not tomorrow, and for sure not the day after that. The day after tomorrow, he’ll be gone. In the next day and a half, he’ll suffer excruciating pain as his body fails him. It will be hard on him mentally and it will be hard on us as well. Daddy knows this.”
“Mac, what are you saying?” asked Hunter.
“This is his way of asking us to help him go. He wants to die with dignity.”
Barb began to cry. Hunter moved in to comfort her. After a moment, she wiped away the tears.
“It makes sense now. He doesn’t want to come out and say the words assisted suicide. He wanted me to reach the conclusion on my own by using the line from Hamlet dealing with the bare bodkin, a simple dagger, and the Latin word quietus, meaning the final death.”
Mac held her mother. The two hadn’t shared many tender moments in their lives together, much less after Mac had become an adult. Now, as mother and daughter, they’d have to make one of the biggest decisions a family faces.
“Mom,” said Mac as she pulled away, “what do we do? Everyone knows this is going to get worse. His body will begin to shut down with each passing hour. We can provide him a strong morphine cocktail to ease his pain, but all that will do is ignore his wishes.”
Barb didn’t say anything for a moment, which gave Doc an opportunity to counsel the family.
“Y’all know I think the world of all y’all. I don’t believe anybody should have a right to die, but Colorado does have a law on the books that allows people to choose a fast and painless death in a manner that’s good for them. It doesn’t matter whether you call it right to die, or death with dignity, or a happy death. The end result is the same. The question is whether you grant his wishes or not. That’s why folks create living wills in order to take the emotional aspect out of the decision-making process.”
“Mom, do you guys have a living will?” asked Mac.
“I do. It was required by the Army. Your father never got around to signing one.”
“Did he ever express his wishes to you?” asked Mac. “I mean, surely you guys talked about it if you created one through the military.”
Barb took a few steps toward the house and attempted to peer through the window. She put her hands on her hips and kicked some stones at her feet.
“Yes, we did talk about it,” she finally replied. “Once, after seeing Hamlet, we debated the meaning of the line I recited to him. The other occasion was when I signed my advanced directives.”
“Well, what did he say? Also, what did you put in your living will?”
“Dear, we both agreed. We didn’t want any extraordinary measures to keep us alive. Also, we agreed the best way to die with dignity is with the assistance of a doctor if we’re terminally ill. I hope you understand. Neither of us ever wanted to be a burden on you in our final days. It had nothing to do with losing faith in your abilities or our love as a family. We just wanted to make things easy on our daughter.”
Mac ran to her mother and they hugged each other for several minutes. Eventually, the crying subsided and they walked back arm in arm to a waiting Doc and Hunter.
“Doc, will you help us?” asked Barb. “We want to honor Tommy’s wishes.”
Doc hugged them both and explained their options. “Okay, things have changed since the days Dr. Kevorkian began shooting people up with potassium chloride. He’d first provide a painkiller and then the fatal dose of potassium chloride, which caused cardiac arrest. Today, there are two better, generally accepted and approved compounds used in states like Oregon, Washington, Montana, and California, which have all passed assisted-suicide statutes.
“This gets a little technical, but the option most often used is a lethal dose of phenobarbital, chloral hydrate, and morphine, which has to be compounded in the pharmacy. Likewise, a new mix using morphine, Valium, Inderal, and digoxin will work if the local pharmacy doesn’t have the chemicals necessary to create the compound. The morphine will ease his pain and the Valium will calm his nerves and alleviate anxiety.”
“The last two medications are for heart patients, right?” asked Barb.
“Yes, but in large doses, using the two together will dramatically slow his heart rate until it stops beating. Personally, I’d suggest the compounded mix of the three drugs in powdered form. It tends to have a bitter taste, but we might be able to add a little sugar or mix it with applesauce.”
Barb laughed nervously. “If I know my husband, he’ll wanna go out like John Wayne in some western movie. Mix it with a shot of your finest whiskey, Doc. He’ll hold his nose and take it with a smile.”
Everyone released some of the tension over Tommy’s certain demise by laughing along with his wife of forty years. Barb gave Doc a hug and said, “Will you get everything we need?”
“Yeah, it’ll take some doin’. The sheriff has that pharmacy under lock and key with twenty-four-seven armed security. The pharmacist may or may not do what I’m asking. He’s funny that way. Don’t you worry your little head none. I’ll get ’er done and see y’all back down here in the morning, okay?”
“Thank you, Doc,” replied Barb.
Mac hesitated and then hugged Doc as well. She still wasn’t a hundred percent on board with the whole assisted-suicide concept—not when there was still a chance. After she visited with her father, she’d wrestle with the decision and get Hunter’s opinion. If her mother insisted, then she’d have to decide whether the drama should be avoided in her daddy’s final days.
Chapter 5
Day Seventy-Nine
Noah’s Ark
Boreas Pass at Red Mountain
Boreas Pass used to be known as Breckenridge Pass when the Den
ver, South Park, and Pacific Railroad traveled through it, carrying miners from Denver throughout Summit and Park Counties. Few events in the history of Summit County and Breckenridge were more important than the 1882 arrival of the railroad. It connected the growing western town of Denver to the numerous gold mines that had sprung up throughout the Rockies.
The town of Boreas emerged near the rails running from the south into Breckenridge. Named for the Greek God of the North Wind, the perilous trail through the pass ran up to twelve thousand feet, battled fierce winds and steep, five percent grades.
Despite the brutal winters, the miners came and inhabited the valley. At one point, estimates approaching thirty thousand residents of Boreas Pass spent their days mining deep within Boreas Mountain, Red Mountain, and Mount Argentine.
During its heyday, at the time of the Civil War, Colorado mines produced two hundred thousand ounces of gold per year, leading to the creation of the Denver Mint.
Eventually the gold began to dwindle in supply and thousands of gold seekers became disappointed. They abandoned the mines and tried their hands at panning. The yield didn’t justify the time spent for most of the prospectors, and the migration back to the Great Plains began.
Known as the go-backers, the ragged, foot-weary prospectors returned back east, crossing paths with the thousands who were headed west to seek their fortunes. Without gold, these new residents ultimately moved on to Nevada and California.
Make no mistake, there was still gold in the mountains, but it wasn’t cost effective to mine it due to the high cost of machinery and labor. Prospectors of old could still make a decent living, but they were few and far between, except at Noah’s Ark.
Rulon Snow had a business sense about him. When he was faced with life in prison, he made a business decision rather than an emotional one. He’d testify against the Prophet in that federal courtroom in Salt Lake City and he’d get paid for it.
In exchange for his testimony, the government provided Snow forty acres of seclusion on what they considered a pile of rocks. The Department of Justice didn’t pay attention to the actual topography of the land, simply assuming it looked like the side of every rocky mountain.
What Snow received was a horseshoe-shaped meadow surrounded by steep cliffs. The meadow was fertile soil created by the constant erosion of the rocky peaks that surrounded it. Abandoned log cabins dotted the landscape, providing Snow decent enough lodging for his flock of three sister wives and their children.
In the rear of the property, at the base of Red Mountain, was a rock outcropping marking the entrance to the old Boreas Mine. After the mine was emptied of fifty thousand tons of copper ore in the roaring twenties, it was abandoned to the federal government during the Depression of the thirties.
As the story goes, the mine was shuttered in 1926 after a collapse in one of the shafts buried two dozen men alive. A rescue and recovery effort took place in the collapsed shaft, which descended just over a thousand feet at a steep incline into the mountain.
For days, the town assembled to dig out the collapsed rock and debris, eventually finding their way through to the other end of the shaft. What they found horrified everyone in Summit County.
Nothing. There were no miners. No dead bodies. No signs of activity. No new exits. The men had simply vanished.
As a result, the Phelps Dodge Corporation couldn’t find miners to extract the copper ore. They would recruit men out of Denver who were unfamiliar with the tragedy. But as soon as they received their first paycheck and headed into Boreas for food and drink, they learned the story and never returned out of fear.
Phelps Dodge, the mine’s owner, began to lose money, failed to pay their taxes, and soon under the Internal Revenue Act of 1934, gladly turned over the worthless mine to the IRS in exchange for a reprieve on their tax obligations.
Snow knew nothing of the story and the supposed ghosts of Boreas Mine. All he knew was that there was still gold in there. Over the years, he and his burgeoning family worked the mine. Unlike corporate mining operations, his labor was cheap, as in free.
The gold nuggets they found in Snow’s early days in the mine were small, about the size of a dime. A one-gram nugget of this size was worth around sixty dollars. At first, the work was tedious because there was a learning curve. Within a few months, they were prospecting all day and discovering a hundred nuggets in a typical ten-hour work period.
Snow learned how to follow the veins running through the granite. The nuggets got bigger and the veins were richer. The pile of nuggets grew and then 2012 arrived. The price of gold hit $1,664 per ounce, which meant it was time for Snow to cash in.
He and his six sister wives, at that point, systematically traveled from Pueblo to Denver to Fort Collins to sell his nuggets. In a six-month time period, he amassed nearly a million dollars in cash, which he immediately used to fortify his compound.
He’d learned the lessons from the FLDS—Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, in Utah and Texas. To maintain his way of life, he had to keep people out, but he also had to keep them in. As they recruited more sister wives and they bore children, security and privacy became his priorities.
Snow also had to feed the flock. He purchased food that could be stored for long periods of time within the bowels of the Boreas Mine. He stockpiled weapons and ammunition for defense of his family. If Snow didn’t have it, he could afford to buy it, and he did.
When the plague cursed the planet, Snow pounced on the opportunity. Now, eleven weeks into the apocalypse, he was thriving and his flock was growing as he took in more sister wives fearful of contracting the disease and seeking shelter.
Snow stood at the entrance of the mine and admired his accomplishments. Crops were being harvested. Fences were being patrolled. Horses were being trained. Seeds were being sown.
His brow furled as he thought of the first task before him. He unconsciously grabbed his belt, adorned with a heavy leather buckle, which had been passed onto him by his father, in more ways than one.
Spare the rod, spoil the child, Snow thought to himself as he contemplated the whipping he was about to administer to his beloved Seth and Levi for causing those fires. They had reeked of smoke the morning after the fires ravaged the mountains to their north. But it wasn’t the fire that earned them their daily whoopin’ since he’d discovered what they had done. It was the fact they had lied to him about it.
He made that clear to them each time he lectured them. Their punishment was confinement to the mine and a daily beating until Snow thought they’d learned their lesson.
Snow then hitched up his pants and turned into the mine with a smile on his face. After teaching his sons a lesson about lying, he was going to visit his prized possessions—the twins from Fairplay.
Chapter 6
Day Seventy-Nine
Conference Room
Cheyenne Mountain
It had been three days since President Garcia ordered the annihilation of the ISIS command and control structure hidden within the Qandil Mountains. The Minuteman III missile carried nearly five hundred kilotons of energy. Upon impact, it destroyed every structure within a twenty-two-mile radius. It collapsed the vast tunnel network built over the centuries by the Kurds and utilized by Hassan and al-Baghdadi.
The fallout was both deadly and troublesome. The health effects of nuclear explosions were due primarily to the blast, together with the thermal and nuclear radiation. The fallout consisted of weapon debris, fission products, and the tons of radiated soil, dust, and rocky material that spewed into the air for twenty-four hours following the attack.
The government of Iran screamed bloody murder. Through its allies on the United Nations Security Council, Russia and China, they called for the strongest condemnations of the attack and immediate sanctions on the United States.
To which President Garcia said so what. The nuclear attack upon ISIS was the equivalent of a giant stepping on an ant, but it was absolutely necessary to give the United
States of America a win.
It had been very tense within the confines of Cheyenne Mountain over the past seventy-two hours. Some within the government openly questioned the decision and even voiced concerns over the President’s mental stability. Others applauded the decision as a boost for the American psyche.
The military bases around the country enthusiastically cheered the move. Those new residents of the safe zones were all in support of the President. Even the poor and downtrodden who were forced to fight the ravaging plague and their fellow man were glad to hear of the attack.
With each passing day, as the fear of a retaliatory strike by Russia or China passed, President Garcia found a renewed vigor for his job and a love for the American people.
The first thing he did was abandon the bottle. Brandy had become his crutch to get him through the difficulties associated with being the leader of the free world.
Second, he returned to the daily briefings required to perform his duties. The alcohol no longer clouded his mind and his judgment. As a result, the paranoia of the plague lurking in the shadows or within every one of his cabinet members’ breaths subsided. President Garcia was ready to get back to work.
“Good morning, everyone,” announced the President as he entered the largest conference room in Cheyenne Mountain, an auditorium-style seating arrangement that allowed for PowerPoint presentations, podium speaking, and roundtable-style discussions in front of a large audience.
Nearly forty people were in attendance and responded to the President with a hearty good morning. While not all of the longtime government servants agreed with the President, most approved of his actions against ISIS. When word spread throughout the complex that President Garcia would cease to remain in isolation, spirits were lifted in anticipation of his speech.
The leaders of the U.S. government were ready to move on and look at this cataclysmic event in the rearview mirror. The group quietened down as the President tapped the microphone to make sure it was working.