By all accounts, the plan was back on track.
The fuel ransacked from Masterson would prove beneficial for their supply of jeeps and trucks. Alice had a large supply of fuel as well, which Karl planned to dwindle down. In the days following Tom’s death, order had been maintained, but the veil of the Red Hand’s friendliness was beginning to wear thin. However, the days were counting down, and with them, many of the town’s more vocal proponents of Karl’s occupation started to disappear. Some were brought in for questioning, while others were driven out of Alice to a field of rolling grass, and executed.
It came to light that a small group of rebels were meeting at night to discuss these disappearances, and offering ways to try and overthrow Nick’s leadership. The group was discovered with the help of a man named Chris Lockton, who had been a member of Alice’s round table—the men responsible for governing the people. The other members all proved to be incompetent, and subsequently executed—all except for an urban developer named Douglas Banks. He designed a variety of arcane defenses, catapults, and the like. Nick found them appealing in a trivial sort of way, and some were constructed. Karl had to admit that he liked the idea of rocks raining down on his enemies. Or perhaps severed heads. It was delightfully medieval.
Chris Lockton joined the group of malcontents under the guise of friendship, and turned them all over to Karl. Among them was the head gardener, an old man who couldn’t walk faster than a crawl. A girl was also mentioned, who had arrived recently from Hightown to work on the trade route. Three men were leading the group: Simon Kalispell, Jeremy Winters, and Frank Morrow. These men were high-ranking members of Alice’s Ranger and Guard divisions, although both divisions were now defunct. Nick told the people to let the Red Hands do the fighting; it was a way for the town to progress. Nick was good, Karl gave him that. His words were a delicious poison, and the people yearned for more. Under the same guise of safety, Nick told the people that firearms were no longer permitted inside of Alice, and that all weapons were to be turned over. The people were wary about this decree, but with a bit of oppression from the Red Hands, weapons were being turned in.
The resistance group was rounded up early in the morning, and the gardener, the girl named Beth from Hightown, and Will Holbrook—Nick’s old personal guard, turned traitor—were brought in for questioning. The rest of the dissenters were brought to the field to be executed.
Karl delighted in seeing what Doctor Freeman did to make Will Holbrook talk. The boy was strong, but the doctor had his methods.
“It … it’s in a p-park,” Will said, the light in his eyes fading.
“Please go on, and your suffering will end,” the doctor told him.
Will lay on a stainless-steel table, his arms stretched out overhead, and his ankles tied tight. Pieces of him were missing, sitting on another stainless-steel table. Tears had rolled down his face in nonstop trickles, but he no longer cried. After his genitalia was removed and placed on a weight scale, the boy stopped crying. The doctor took notes during the entire ordeal, keeping track of various weights and sketching hasty diagrams of the organs’ inner workings.
“S-Sullivan … Park …” With those words, Doctor Freeman kept his promise, and gave a final incision with his scalpel to end Will’s life and suffering. Brahms was playing on the portable stereo. A light sonata that Karl didn’t recognize.
After hearing the name Sullivan Park, Karl left to address a guard stationed outside the door. “Find me a map,” he said. “And a scout brigade—now.”
“Yes, sir.” The soldier took off fast.
They were in the basement of Nick’s mansion, using the top of a pool table in the game room section to study a map. Karl sent scouts to inspect Sullivan Park to see if it contained the amount of armaments, tanks, helicopters, and transports that Will Holbrook claimed. The scouts were then ordered to intercept the Priest and the main army of the Red Hands. They could arrive with enough firepower to make the war in Hightown a fast victory.
Karl turned back to the rear hallway, toward the unfinished laundry room where they questioned Will Holbrook. He caught Doctor Freeman exiting the room.
“Doctor,” he said, “are you ready to begin on the gardener?”
The doctor nodded. “I’ll have the men bring him in now.”
Karl walked past him, following the hallway to a rear bedroom, once used for the staff of the mansion. The young girl, Bethany Rose, had been brought down while they were questioning Will. They took a break in their procedure as she was strapped to a bed and given tranquilizers on Karl’s insistence. She had a fierce determination, and fought her captors until the last moment.
“I’ll kill the fucking lot of you,” she said, twisting in the arms of a soldier. “All of you—all dead!”
In another world, she would have made a good addition to the Red Hands. Perhaps even an officer.
Karl stared at her tied to the mattress, her hair fanned out, her cheeks red against her fair complexion. “Put her to sleep,” he ordered.
Doctor Freeman didn’t question the order. He gave her an IV line. She resisted and had to be held down. As she was given tranquilizers, her eyes grew heavy, and then closed. The doctor left. He knew about Karl’s disorder. It was part of their unspoken agreement. Karl allowed Doctor Freeman freedom to do as he wished to prisoners in exchange for his assistance fixing up their own men, and the doctor gave Karl drugs so that he could satisfy his desires. Unfortunately, parts of him just didn’t work otherwise.
Karl was staring down at the beautiful girl when someone knocked at the door.
“What is it?” he said in a huff.
The door creaked open, and a soldier entered. “Sir, he’s awake.”
“What?”
“Nick. He’s awake.”
The soldier was doing his duty, but still, Karl was tempted to shoot him right then and there. He’d ordered one of his men to wait in the bedroom beside Nick’s—where the man had fallen into a drunken stupor from the previous night’s party. He was instructed to let him know at once when Nick was awake.
“All right,” Karl said, and turned from the room. He spoke to a guard outside Bethany’s door as he passed, “I will be doing her interrogation myself. Make sure the doctor is aware. Keep her alive and untouched.”
“Yes, sir.”
***
The scouts returned with good news: the armament in Sullivan Park was beyond what they imagined. There were dozens of vehicles and thousands of rounds of ammunition. But, then came the bad news.
While giving the extremely hungover and sick Nicholas Byrnes a tour of what they’d accomplished in the basement overnight, Mark, Sultan, and Ryan Pechman appeared. They were filthy and injured.
Karl sent Nick on his way and spoke to his officers in private. “What the hell happened?” he asked.
They looked at one another, frightened to speak. “It was … Hightown, sir.”
They’d botched the execution of Frank Morrow, Jeremy Winters, Simon Kalispell, and Martin Howard. A supply convoy from Hightown spotted them out on the plain, and there was an exchange of gunfire. Ryan Pechman clutched a wound on his stomach, the rags stained red.
“We sent an envoy to the cargo team, said it was all a mistake,” the young sergeant said.
“Oh?” Karl’s eyebrows rose. “Well, maybe we got off lucky then.”
“Um, yes, sir, I think—”
Karl stepped toward him, bumping into Sergeant Pechman’s chest, making the injured man wince. He loomed tall over the young sergeant, casting his face in shadow. “Who … the fuck … asked for your opinion?”
“I-I, um,” he swallowed, “sir—”
Karl grabbed Ryan Pechman by the throat. Ryan’s eyes seemed to bulge as Karl’s grip tightened, and he dropped the bloody rags clutched to his wound. His feet lifted off the ground for the last conscious moment of his life as something audibly snapped. When Karl let go, Sergeant Pechman fell to the ground, his eyes staring up at the ceiling. In a practiced mot
ion, Karl unholstered his pistol, fired into Ryan’s head, and re-holstered his gun.
“Send men back to the grave, and bury the dead. Cover our tracks. There’s no possible way that Hightown believes it was all an accident, but we need to buy a little more time before we attack.”
Karl patted his pockets for a cigar. His officers were standing at attention.
“What the fuck are you waiting for?”
“Sir,” they said in unison, and left fast up the stairs.
***
“You found this on who?”
“Frank Morrow, sir. What was left of him,” a soldier told Karl.
“He’s dead, you’re sure of it? What about the others?”
“Found them all bludgeoned beyond comprehension, or shot up.”
“But was it them?”
“They had their IDs on them, and were wearing uniforms from Alice.”
Karl looked back to the papers, but remained skeptical. However, if what was outlined on the blueprints was correct, it wouldn’t matter anyway.
“Get a team assembled,” he said, and shooed his officers away.
He coiled the papers, marked Operation Blue Rapture on the top, and proceeded up the basement stairs toward Nick’s wing of the house. He found the man slumped in a plush leather couch in his office, a glass of whiskey in his hand.
“Sir General,” Karl said, snapping Nick out of a daydream. He went on to explain that he had an errand to run, but not to worry, he would return shortly.
“Wh-where you going?” Nick said in a drunken slur.
“It’s of no concern.”
He left before Nick could ask any more questions, and met with the team assembled to extract the B83 nuclear bomb that the blueprints said was hidden in a nearby house. Operation Blue Rapture called for all of Alice to be destroyed in the event of an emergency. Hightown had set up this failsafe without anyone in Alice becoming the wiser, and it appeared that Frank Morrow, Jeremy, and Simon had been planning to act on these plans.
At dawn, they drove down Ridgeline Road and parked in front of the house. The directions led them to a glass greenhouse in the rear, and to a storage shed inside. Karl lifted a paver and saw the metal of a trapdoor beneath.
“Open it,” he said, barely able to contain his excitement.
They removed the pavers and cut the lock. An engineer proceeded down the steps along with Sultan. Mark stayed by Karl’s side, along with a few soldiers.
“We see it,” the engineer said.
Mark walked to the stairway, Karl behind him. He was just saying, “Don’t touch a thing,” when all at once a flash enveloped his eyesight, and he felt the force of the world crash against his chest as the explosion blasted a gale of torrent up the stairway. Mark disappeared. Before Karl hit the ground his vision turned black, and reality was extinguished.
Chapter Twenty-five
Awake
His eyes twitched and then cracked open. Whatever dark crevice of his mind first became conscious was trying to rationalize his sudden reentry into the world, as he stared into an unknown void.
I’m home, under the covers, and I’m a child, his mind substantiated, then jumped, I’m staring at the cement ceiling in my cell in Huntsville—or maybe Atlanta … No, I’m staring at the ceiling of the train car, and any minute now the door will slide open and the conductor will find me lying here using my stained orange jumpsuit as a blanket.
But …
… wait …
I’m staring at the sky …
It was the smoke billowing out from the house that woke him from the depths of unconsciousness, causing him to cough himself awake. With each convulsion of his body, he remembered where he was and how much pain he was in.
Karl attempted to move, but the rushes of agony forced him to stop.
He lifted his right hand, flexing his fingers one at a time, and then he moved to his toes and began contracting each and every muscle in turn, seeing what was there and what was not.
A fire raged in the house, and the flames bellowed out through the doorway. The heat was so intense that he felt the hairs on his body singe. Drifting cinders floated through the air, some searing his skin where they landed. The room was collapsed, with flames emerging from the ground, and he saw the outline of a decapitated head mixed in with a pile of wreckage.
Smoke poured out like rapids on a river, escaping through the shattered glass frame of the greenhouse. Asphyxiation was close at hand if the flames did not cook him first. His arms reached out and his body twisted and turned over, shedding the blanket of thick dust, rocks, and glass shards off his chest. Gritting his teeth against the pain, Karl peeled his body off the ground, where dried blood had kept him stuck to the floor like glue.
As he crawled, his wounds reopened; yet onward he went, ignoring his suffering and the pangs of bright light and dark spots that at times consumed his vision.
Outside on the lawn, as the intense heat dissipated, he turned on his back, panting, to see the flaming house that had almost become his pyre.
Karl stared in fascination, and then a funny feeling overtook him.
He began laughing. “You cannot kill me—no one can kill Karl Metzger, although they try!”
He laughed uncontrollably, but any movement caused sharp pains in his abdomen and back.
He pushed himself up on his elbows and then his forearms. Dizziness gave him pause. A length of splintered wood lay on the lawn, mixed with other debris propelled from the house. Karl grabbed it and used it to pull himself to his feet. It was a slow and deliberate process, and twice he nearly passed out.
Where the hell are my men?
Before he could finish asking his own question, he knew the answer. He knew it as the early morning sky turned a paler form of black. The horizon was filled with a burning orange tinge and clouds of gray smoke rose high. Karl saw at that moment the blades of helicopters—one, two, maybe more—moving up and down along the front line, far off in the distance like malicious flies.
I’ve been defeated.
He stared a moment longer, and soon he laughed again despite his body’s painful protests. “Burn it all down, then. Ha! Let it turn to ash! There is always another fire to start, another town to ignite! The inferno of the world, it will never be extinguished! The horizons will forever burn, and I will hold the torch!”
Karl Metzger turned to where a narrow gate led to a path down a steep embankment and to the Ridgeline River below. Moving was hard, and the blood streaming from his open wounds was made worse with each step. But Karl Metzger made it to the gate, and to the steep staircase and ramp beyond, where a small dock bobbed up and down on the water.
On the platform beside the dock was a tall wooden rack, the pegs constructed to hold canoes and rafts. Two rowboats were tied there, and it took a considerable amount of strength to pull one down. Blood made his grip slippery, and before he dropped the boat in the water, he had to sit and catch his breath. He tied a tourniquet made from a scrap of his tattered shirt around his kneecap, and then he pushed the boat into the water. He slid his ragged body into the hull and let the boat drift over the bounding swells.
After some time, Karl found a single oar bungeed to the side and paddled his way toward the opposite shore.
You cannot kill me …
His vision was grainy, with swells of pixilated lights. His strength was fading. The oar almost fell from his numb fingers.
“Easy does it, old man. Stay with it.”
The opposite bank was steep, just as in the towns of Fairview and Alice, but Karl could see a natural, earthen ramp where several small docks jutted out among old half-sunken and lopsided yachts.
As Karl rowed closer to shore, he saw a fishing boat pulled up on the embankment, identical to his own. He followed the course, rowing until the bow of his small boat hit land. A man wearing a black trench coat stood watching him the entire time, not moving from his perch atop the hill. The man shifted his briefcase to the other hand and pushed his glasses up th
e bridge of his nose. Karl stood on shaking legs, careful not to slip on the blood smeared inside the hull. He swallowed, staring at the only man who could put fear in his heart.
“Hey!” Karl shouted. “Arthur, ol’ pal. Be a sport, would you? Give me a hand here.”
The beady eyes of Doctor Arthur Freeman stared down at Karl Metzger.
Chapter Twenty-six
Rise
His eyes blinked open, staring unsteadily down the embankment to the rowboat he’d left bobbing against the shore. Judging by the dark blue shade of the morning, Karl judged that he had been unconscious for only a moment.
Doctor Freeman knelt in front of him, tightly wrapping his thigh with duct tape. Karl clenched his eyes shut against the pain. He’d passed out twice already since making his way up the embankment, and he wanted to remain conscious. The doctor roughly jostled his leg, pressing fingers to the wounds to stem the flow of blood. Karl leaned his head against the back of a tree as lacerations on his face and neck were explored. He gazed at the rowboat moving with each gentle wave; saw blood streaked on the seat and walls, and wondered how much blood he’d lost … how much he was still losing …
… how much could he lose and survive …
stand …
… walk …
… to leave this godforsaken land.
“You need stitches, but we got to move. That’s all I can do for now.” The doctor’s words brought Karl out of his reverie, and he noticed just how still and quiet the world was outside of his thoughts.
The war is over … I’ve lost.
Doctor Freeman packed up his supplies, wiping the blood off his tools and hands with a cloth, and tossed everything in his leather briefcase. He stood and found his trench coat, and was putting it on as he asked, “Can you stand?”
Karl wasn’t sure. His outstretched legs might have been logs.
“Find me that oar there,” he said, pointing to where he dropped it.
The doctor handed him the oar and helped pull him to his feet. The blood seemed to rush from his head in a whoosh, and Karl’s vision was a sea of dull pixilation. Everything became numb: his limbs, his ears, his nose. His upper lip tingled, and his knees quaked.
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