“How is she?” he asked.
When Gary answered, Jim couldn’t hear the response. He pointed at his ears. Gary gave him a thumbs up and Randi did the same.
Jim was not thinking clearly. The blow to his head, his wounds, the noise... They were missing someone. He grabbed Hugh. “Lloyd? Is he okay?”
Hugh gave him a thumbs up and led him off the chopper. On the far side of the chopper, near the visitor’s side bleachers, Lloyd stood behind two blindfolded and bound men, holding them at gunpoint. Their uniforms identified them as the pilots of the chopper.
Hugh leaned close and shouted into Jim’s ear. “Our ride home!”
42
They stripped Boss of his gear and left him on the football field. As the chopper climbed and banked away, Jim thought he barely looked human. He was torn and ruined, sprawled like roadkill in the middle of an overgrown high school football field.
“This was personal, Jim,” Hugh said. “I’m sure of it.”
“How can you be so certain?”
“I recognize that guy. He’s the one I fought with on the catwalk. I cut off his hand when he was fighting with your friend.”
Jim gestured at his wounds, the blood, his banged up face. “All this should have been for you?”
Hugh grinned. “I wasn’t careless enough to get my picture taken.”
“Then maybe it is over.”
Lloyd continued to hold a gun on the pilots while the rest tended to their wounds. Hugh had taken several rounds to his rear armor plate, leaving his back one solid bruise. Splatter from the rounds had lacerated his scalp on the back of his head. He’d also taken a through-and-through wound to the shoulder.
Randi had been caught in the front plate and the ricocheting round had sliced open her bicep. The wound would require stitches and antibiotics, but was not life threatening. Jim had several deep punctures and tears to the tissue of his muscles but most concerning was the wound to his head. He’d been hit hard several times and likely had a concussion.
They guided the pilots to the field in the valley where Scott usually landed. Hugh had them turn off the engines, and they directed the pilots outside where they had them kneel in the grass.
“Please don’t kill us,” Stanley asked.
“We can’t let you bring other people here,” Jim said. “If we let you go, this will just happen again.”
“No, it won’t,” Davis said. “We were paid to perform this mission. The captain was acting outside his orders. No one knows he was here.”
“How do we know you’re telling the truth?” Hugh asked.
“He killed our crew chief and threw him out of the chopper. Our chief tried to stop him from firing on the other chopper,” Stanley said. “We didn’t know what we were signing up for. Can I show you something? Look inside my pocket.”
Hugh went to him and stuck his fingers inside the shirt pocket. He came out with the Krugerrands and held them up for everyone to see.
“See? He paid us. This wasn’t a sanctioned mission. He falsified orders to get us down here and paid us for silence. We can’t go back and talk about this or we’ll be locked up for participating. You have to believe us,” Davis said.
“I’m inclined to think we just kill them and be done with it,” Randi said.
“Then we have to get rid of the chopper,” Gary said. “It will draw too much attention.”
“Can’t you fly it out of here?” Hugh asked.
“I can fly planes, but not a chopper. Whole different animal.”
Hugh looked at Jim. “What do you think?”
Jim weighed his options. As he did, he noticed his family emerging over a nearby hill and starting down into the pasture. They were followed by the other members of their tribe. If they killed them now, it would be in front of everyone. Jim had seen enough killing. He’d spilled enough blood.
“Do you have your identification?” Jim asked.
The pilots looked at each other, then Davis replied, “Yeah.”
“Give them to me,” Jim said.
The men dug around and handed over the military IDs to Jim.
He held them up. “I know who you are now. If you come back with people, I’ll hand these over with a good story about how you all have been providing supplies to assist us in our insurgent activities. I can’t be sure it will do any good, but do you want to take that chance?”
Both men shook their heads.
“You can take the gold,” Stanley said.
Jim shook his head. “I don’t want your gold. If the money was to buy your silence, I hope it does the same coming from me. We’re going to strip the chopper of anything we can use, and take that belt-fed weapon. Then you can leave.”
Their families were calling to them and waving now. Although the joy of the reunion was derailed by the extent of everyone’s injuries, they had all come home and they were all alive.
In five minutes they had everything they wanted from the chopper. The pilots thanked them repeatedly, vowing their silence. Jim hoped he was doing the right thing. They backed their families away from the chopper and everyone watched as it rose into the sky.
“Let’s get you home,” Ellen said.
“I’m not sure I can walk,” Jim said.
Pete and Charlie had remained to watch the house. They radioed back and the boys came out with a string of horses for the injured. Jim felt odd riding while his family walked but he was glad to be sitting astride the horse and not strapped dead across its back.
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While he healed, Jim stayed put in his valley. He shaved his head and grew his beard long, altering his appearance in the easiest way. He switched to a different style of hat, changing his cap for a wide-brimmed felt hat from Lloyd’s collection. He worked the land and focused his efforts on the crops. With his wife, they grew, harvested, and preserved.
The residents continued to man observation posts throughout the valley but there were no more incursions. No one ventured into town to monitor the rumor mill but the valley folks assumed the ruse had worked. People thought Jim Powell was gone. Hopefully that meant they’d get their power back soon. The big bad man had been sacrificed on the altar.
Jim thought about mending fences with the Wimmer family, ultimately deciding to avoid them. He didn’t want them knowing he was alive. He stuck to his part of the valley and did not cross paths with them. Everyone in his tribe knew to do the same. They needed the Wimmers thinking he was dead. No one wanted to go back to having to watch their backs all the time.
Jim worked every day on pushing the dark thoughts from his mind. He spent time with his children and did the things they used to do. They fished and played games. He read books with Ariel, trapped with Pete and Charlie. As his healing muscles allowed, he split firewood and thought. He stared off at Beartown Mountain in the distance.
When the calf muscle healed and he was able to walk better, he was going to try to get up there and see if he could find that cave where the Civil War deserters had hidden out. Things were calm now but it would be naïve to assume they’d stay that way. He needed that next step in his planning. The final option. The scorched earth plan. Besides, backpacking trips like that used to be important to him. He could take Pete and Charlie with him.
He tried to sit on the porch with his wife every day and reconnect. She needed to know she hadn’t lost her husband entirely to the violence and darkness. Sitting there made him think of wine. It would be his winter project to make some from fruit harvested in the valley. In the meantime, they made do with a bottle of blackberry moonshine Lloyd had parted with. He made a great show of crying fake tears as Jim walked away with it. At least Jim assumed they were fake tears.
On a warm July evening, he sat on the porch swing with his wife and had a glass of the dark burgundy liquor. There was a mild breeze and they stared out at the tall corn waving in the garden.
“I’m sorry for what I’ve become,” Jim said. “I know I’ve been distant. With the internet down, I guess you’re
stuck with me. There are no more dating websites.”
“You’ve been what you had to be,” Ellen said. “It’s difficult sometimes but I don’t blame you. I blame the world.”
“I’ll try to do better.”
Jim knew it was all he could do. Society brushed a thin veneer over people but it wasn’t real. You combed your hair, put on nice clothes, and behaved yourself to remain gainfully employed. You drove the speed limit and tried not to kill the people who pissed you off. You bit your tongue every day to keep from saying all the things you wanted to say. You got by.
The thing about veneer was that sometimes it chipped off, and when it did, you didn’t always recognize what was beneath it. The people around you all thought the same thing, trying to figure out what happened to the nice, normal, sane person they used to know. Hard times could scrape you raw, like a glacier bulldozing the Earth flat. You couldn’t plan for what might be revealed in that raw, pink wound.
Jim had lost his veneer and was adapting to that self he found beneath it. He only hoped the world could adapt with him.
Bonus Content
Please enjoy this sample chapter from The Mad Mick, the first book in The Mad Mick Series
Meet The Mad Mick
Conor Maguire felt the approach of colder weather in the morning air. He wore short sleeves but caught a slight chill on his front porch until the sunlight hit him and warmed his skin. He sipped coffee from a large mug, his favorite, embossed with Coffee Makes Me Poop. It had been a Father’s Day present from his daughter Barb, who really knew how to pick a gift.
There had been no frost yet, but that would come soon. The previous night had probably gone as low as the upper forties, but if the recent weather pattern held they should see upper sixties to lower seventies by the end of the day. It kind of sucked to not have a goofy weatherman updating them each evening on what to expect. It sucked not having an app on his phone that would allow him to see a current weather radar. All that technology had disappeared with the nationwide collapse.
Goats and hair sheep wandered the fenced compound nibbling at clusters of grass poking through crumbling fissures in the asphalt, dry leaves crackling beneath their hooves. Chickens trailed the goats, searching for bugs, worms, or anything unfamiliar to eat. Crows cawed in the distance, making their plans for the day. Conor dreaded the winter. He dreaded the cold and the inevitable discomfort winter brought. He dreaded the misery and suffering. Not so much for himself, as he was well-provisioned and had wood heat, but studies both public and private had shown that the first winter with no power would result in a massive loss of life.
As a statistic, those lives meant little to him. He was a solitary person. But when you zoomed in on them, those lives were neighbors, they were kids he saw playing in the yards of homes he used to drive by; and elderly folks who waved to him from the porches of humble houses with white aluminum siding and cast iron eagles over the garage door. When spring came, when the crocuses pushed through the cool, damp earth, the world would be a changed place. Conor could not help but be very concerned about what stood between the world he looked at now and that future world he could not even imagine. Between those two bookends lay volumes of death, sickness, suffering, and unthinkable pain.
Conor's friends called him “the Mad Mick,” and if you knew him long enough you would understand why. He walked to the beat of his own deranged and drunken drummer. He had his own code of morality with zero fucks given as to what others thought of it. He lived with his daughter Barb in what he referred to as a homey cottage on top of a mountain in Jewell Ridge, Virginia. His cottage had once been the headquarters of a now-defunct coal company. It was a massive, sprawling facility where there had once been both underground and longwall mines. Numerous buildings scattered around the property held repair shops and offices.
When Conor first looked at the property he thought it was absolutely ridiculous that a man might be so fortunate as to live there. It reminded him of the lair of some evil genius in an old James Bond movie. It was surrounded by an eight-foot high chain-link fence and topped with barbed wire. There was a helipad and more space than he could ever use. There was even an elevator that would take him to an underground shop the coal company had used to repair their mining equipment.
The ridiculous part was that the facility, which had cost the coal company millions of dollars to build out, was selling for just a fraction of that because it was in such a remote location no one wanted it. In the end Conor came to own the facility and it did not even cost him a penny. His grateful employer had purchased the property for him. It was not an entirely charitable gesture, though. Conor was a very specialized type of contractor and his employer would do nearly anything to keep him at their beck and call.
In an effort to make the place more like a home, Conor had taken one of the steel-skinned office buildings and built a long wooden porch on it, then added a wooden screen door in front of the heavy steel door. Going in and out now produced a satisfying thwack as the wooden door smacked shut.
Conor placed his coffee cup on a table made from an old cable spool and sat in a creaking wicker chair. Barb backed out the door with two plates.
“I hope you’ve been to the fecking Bojangles,” Conor said. “I could use a biscuit and a big honking cup of sweet tea.”
Barb frowned at him. “You’re an Irishman, born in the old country no less, and you call that syrupy crap tea?”
“Bo knows biscuits. Bo knows sweet tea.”
“Bo is why you had to take to wearing sweatpants all the time too,” Barb said. “You couldn’t squeeze that big old biscuit of yours into a pair of jeans anymore.” She handed her dad a plate of onions and canned ham scrambled into a couple of fresh eggs.
Conor frowned at the insinuation but the frown turned to a smile as his eyes took in the sprinkling of goat cheese that topped off the breakfast. “Damn, that smells delicious.”
“Barb knows eggs,” his daughter quipped.
“Barb does know eggs,” Conor agreed, shoveling a forkful into his mouth.
Conor was born in Ireland and came to the U.S. with his mom as a young man. Back in Ireland, the family business was bomb-making and the family business led to a lot of family enemies, especially among the police and the military. After his father and grandfather were arrested in the troubles, Conor’s mom decided that changing countries might be the only way to keep what was left of her family alive. She didn’t realize Conor had already learned the rudiments of the trade while watching the men of his family build bombs. Assuming Conor would one day be engaged to carry on the fight, the men of the family maintained a running narrative, explaining each detail of what they were doing. Conor learned later, in a dramatic and deadly fashion, that he was able to retain a surprising amount of those early childhood lessons.
He and his mother settled first in Boston, then in North Carolina where Conor attended school. In high school, Conor chose vocational school and went on to a technical school after graduation. He loved working with his hands to create precise mechanisms from raw materials, which led him to becoming a skilled machinist and fabricator.
Conor was well-behaved for most of his life, flying under the radar and avoiding any legal entanglements. Then he was married, and the highest and lowest points of his life quickly showed up at his doorstep. He and his wife had a baby girl. A year later a drunk driver killed his wife and nearly killed Barb too. Something snapped in Conor and the affable Irishman became weaponized. He combined his childhood bomb-making lessons with the machinist skills he’d obtained in technical school and sought vengeance.
How could he not? Justice had not been served. There was also something deep within Conor that told him you didn’t just accept such things. You continued the fight. There was the law of books and there was the law of man. The law of man required Conor seek true justice for his dead wife.
When the drunk driver was released from jail in what the Mad Mick felt was a laughably short amount of time, the reformed dr
unk was given special court permission to drive to work. Conor took matters into his own hands. He obtained a duplicate of the headrest in the man’s truck from a junkyard and built a bomb inside it. While the man was at his job, Conor switched out the headrest. A proximity switch in the bomb was triggered by a transmitter hidden along his route home. One moment he was singing along to Journey on the radio and enjoying his new freedom. The next, his head was vaporized to an aerosol mist by the exploding headrest.
No one was able to pin the death on Conor despite a lack of other suspects. He had a rock-solid alibi. The proximity trigger detonated the bomb because the man drove within its range. No manual detonation was required on Conor’s part at all. After putting everything in place, Conor took his young daughter to the mall to get a few items. Dozens of security cameras picked up the widower and his daughter.
Oddly enough, his handiwork resulted in a job offer from an alphabet agency within the United States government. A team of men who made their living doing such things were impressed with Conor’s technique. They recognized him as one of their own and wanted to give him a position among their very unique department. He would work as a contractor, he would be well paid, and he would be provided with a shop in which do to his work. There were no papers to sign but it was made quite clear that any discussion of his work with civilians would result in his death.
Conor knew a good opportunity when he saw it. He accepted the offer and, as he proved his worth, his employer decided it was worthwhile to set Conor up in his deep-cover facility in Jewell Ridge, Virginia. On the surface, Conor presented himself to the local community as a semi-retired machinist who’d moved to the mountains to get away from the city. Mostly as a hobby and to help establish his cover, he took in some machining and fabrication work from the local coal and natural gas industry. Behind that façade, Conor was the guy that certain agencies and contractors came to for explosives and unique custom weapons for specialized operations.
The Ungovernable Page 28