by Dennis Fueyo
Head tilted, Emelia replied, “Why, Sam Mason! Do you find me—”
Tom stepped between them, interrupting her observation. “We sometimes learn by looking inside, Sammy. Call it a heuristic approach. An outside observer has limits, Son. I am not defending her grandfather’s behavior,” he said and looked at her, “nor her aunt’s, but everyone wants the same thing.”
“Oh?” Sam’s eyebrow cocked and his mouth loaded with egregious insults. Emelia’s appearance deflected by his dad, Sam’s anger churned unabated into a tornado. “I would never expect you to defend nor disturb Arnold Stone’s behavior. He ruined your life! After all the bullshit he put our family through, you cowed to his will—and still do. I will never let a Stone control my life, let alone read my fucking mind. Every one of those assholes is a poisonous, manipulating, self-centered megalomaniac.”
Seeing his dad’s eyes moisten, he swallowed angst and fired a muted question, “Fine, tell me then, what is it we all want, Dad?”
Tom sat down in the wet sand, shielding his eyes from the soft, pelting rain. “I suppose the clearest way to put it—we all want to rise above what we have become.”
“We will never rise above extinction if we lose our humanity!” Sam scooped up his gear, displacing a few puddles in the process. “Changing into something sinister, ripping a life apart for laboratory study, manipulating the minds of others; we only learn how better to destroy ourselves.”
Sam then slung his pack and commanded, “Spotters, get moving! We have a few hours of daylight, enough to reach the eastern edge of Green Swamp Preserve.” Giving an intense stare to Emelia, he added, “Stay off my tracks, I need space to think.”
Chapter 12
“Sam Mason! Welcome back, master hunter,” Elder Richard Buttonwood said, reached outward, and drew Sam in for a hug. “My, you brought back a collection of characters.”
“You have no idea. Elder, I introduce to you Dr. Emelia Stone, Ms. Sheila Briggs, Sargent James Laramie, Dr. Lou Frasier, and Dr. Thomas Mason.”
The tall, thin Buttonwood stroked his nose. “Well, now. Your father, I presume. Rumor has reached me that you bring ill news, master hunter.”
Sam replied, standing firm, “Indeed, yes, sir.”
“Then it is true, the northern threat is finally upon us.”
Abu Zaid interjected, “Midwestern, sir.”
“Come again, my boy?”
“The jackers come from the Midwest. Increasing evidence suggests they travel from the Great Lakes.”
The elder’s pupils narrowed. “Strange no ships have traveled southward carrying this news.” Wiping down his pants, he motioned, saying, “Please, everyone, have a seat.”
Electric lights in the main hall flickered overhead, pulsing off generated alternating current. Fanciful paintings and taxidermized animals adorned the walls, and lived-in sectional couches and lazy chairs created circles reminiscent of an old pre-Depression era gentleman’s club.
Dealer Merle Dower and Master Builder Sharron “Daisy” Chauncey joined the gathering. Daisy gave Abu a wet kiss on the cheek and tickled his tummy. Merle would not avert his eyes from Sheila’s chest.
The elder asked, “Merle, do you know this young lady?”
“Yes, sir. Normally, she wears clothes dyed red and a striped scarf. Took a minute, but I recognize her.”
“Do you hail from the Britts, Ms. Sheila Briggs?”
Sheila replied, “I do, Elder Buttonwood. Your tribe has made Wilmington a welcoming city.”
Merle’s eyes tried to dominate her, glaring as some dog plotting its feast. “I find the Britts to be equally welcoming, missy. Always accommodative to a man of my stature.”
Abu shifted to spring, but Daisy held his arm. She motioned to Sam, swaying her hand in Merle’s direction. As Sam prepared to stand and confront the dealer, Tom leaped up anticipating confrontation.
“What type of tribe are you running, Buttonwood?” Tom asked, shoulders raised.
“I beg your pardon?” responded Buttonwood in a tone Sam knew—feigned surprise.
Sam barked, “Dad, sit down!”
Tom leaned and whispered in Sam’s ear, “Better me than you, Son.” He poked Sam’s shoulder and winked, adding, “The hand is quicker than the eye.” He then uprighted and asked the elder, “Is it normal to let your people make guests feel uncomfortable?”
“Dr. Mason”—Elder Buttonwood loosened his top button—“mind your place, sir.”
“We came here to help your people.” Tom aimed a stiff finger at Merle Dower. “This idiot looks over my guide as if she is some sort of sexual snack. Here you sit, allowing it in ignorance.”
To Sam’s surprise, he felt a twinge of green. He wanted to stand before the elder and accuse him of poor leadership for months but regulated his tongue out of respect for the tribe. Here stood Dad engaging the issue unabated. Tucking jealousy into his pocket, Sam rooted for Tom in his own way—plotting his next move. If Dad has trouble, he thought, I am going to do it. I will take out both the dealer and the elder. The coup is long overdue.
The elder leaned back in his sunken, plush chair. Raising a hand, he commanded Merle to remain in his seat. A taciturn Elder Buttonwood then spoke to Tom, “Came to help me, did you? Three scientists and a swamp stomper. I guess you plan to charge the jackers singlehandedly, saving the day. I suppose you’ll use magic to bypass our traps, infiltrate their ranks and chase hundreds of the enemy back to West Virginia, killing off stragglers as you skate along. Well, Divers, I expect a show coming soon to our quiet, meager little establishment.”
“Dad,” Sam begged, “Please sit down and let me speak.”
“Yes, Dad,” Merle mocked, “Sit down before someone makes you sit down.”
No one registered what happened next when a blurred chop to the dealer’s windpipe crushed his trachea. As the lecherous Dealer Merle Dower hunched over gagging for air, Tom slipped back into his seat. Merle spun around, fell on his back, and clawed the wooden floor hard enough for splinters to pit under his nails. As others leaned forward and tried to understand what had happened, he gasped one last breath and emptied his lungs. Merle Dower, the dealer for the Divers, lay dead with clouding eyes staring at the ceiling.
“What the hell?” Elder Buttonwood asked Tom, wearing a vacant gaze. “What did you do?”
“God damn,” Sheila remarked, “Well, that was unexpected.”
The elder squeezed his armrests. “Are you out of your mind, Dr. Mason?”
Tom looked to Sam—his son, speechless—and back to the elder. “Now you listen up, you dried-out fossil. I have seen things out there in the woods. Men torn apart by the unseen.” He patted James’ shoulder. “I have seen the dead rise and fight something from another world. Jailed by the Britts, shot at by jackers, and challenged to a knife fight by my own commanding officer…I faced a demon and stared long into its red eyes as it summoned pestilence down on my head.”
Faint ticks from an old ceiling fan drummed out in the silent room. Droplets of condensate slid down Elder Buttonwood’s ice-filled glass, pinging a metal platter.
Tom pointed at the elder and said coldly, “I made a bargain with something you could never understand. I have been through earth, fire, and water to offer my life defending your tribe. Next person who looks at my friends wrong will have both arms and legs shoved so far up their ass, they will need to open their mouth to crawl.”
“My God, man,” Elder Buttonwood admired, “I am humbled. And I understand why Raleigh sent you. If your three friends are half as crazy as you, we will win! We will beat this menace from the Great Lakes!”
Daisy rocketed up, drink swirling in hand, and shouted, “Here, here! What he said!” She wrapped her arm around Abu. “With these spotters and their insane friends, we have a fighting chance!” As all stood to raise their glasses, she nudged Abu into Sheila and giggled.
Sam hesitated, his mind accessioning his dad’s story.
As a teenager, Sam called his dad a nerd. Later i
n life, Dad clung to his childhood in a lab playing with experimental toys while Sam hunted in the ocean and engineered defenses for Wilmington in the harsh remnants of the Wash. He suddenly realized Dr. Tom Mason, his dad, clawed out of unimaginable adversity. Tom was a slave to the Stones, suffered incredible pain brought through the green pill’s transformation, and signed the resulting contract in his proverbial blood. Tom viewed Emelia Stone as a daughter figure—their relationship precipitated into stark clarity in Sam’s mind. Lou and James—Tom’s surrogate sons. If his father loved them all, in spite of her pedigree and James’ stomper affiliation, they were outliers to their own inner circles. Empathetic, humanistic souls.
Sam raised his glass to Emelia and cheered, “Here, here!”
She grinned, reciprocated a cheer, and clinked his glass. “To the crazy righteous, may they never lose their spark.”
Catching the exchange between Emelia and Sam, Tom tapped the elder’s glass and said, “The future is looking bright, sir.”
∆ ∆ ∆
That night, festivities meandered to the ocean’s shore. Rainclouds cleared away, allowing heaven’s lamplights to shine. A full moon glazed pathways through Wilmington for Buttonwood’s entourage, traversed by bicycle and settling in the center of an old, dilapidated mall off Eastwood Road.
Sam struck a fire, and Daisy passed around Elder Buttonwood’s homemade brew. Shaquan had wanted to show off the Bridge Tender Marina, but high tide quaffed any chance of taking in its archaic elegance.
“I used to take Sammy here when he was a little guy,” Tom said while watching waves break along old, crumbling structures. “Do you remember?”
Sam shook his head, laughing. “Wish I didn’t.”
“You would pretend you were a hermit crab—”
“Ugh, Dad…here we go.”
“I sought beached creatures hoping to biopsy an intact intestine. You know, so you could see what they ate.”
“Not exactly Legos.” Sam tossed a piece of rotted molding into the fire, the faded word “Lodge” stamped on it.
“Yeah, right”—Lou snickered—“Sammy would never dissect an animal.”
“My dad was the same way,” Shaquan reflected. “He always brought me diseased plants. They had grey powder dusting into the air or ooze seeping out cankers. He would say, hey Son, look at this! Hey Son, check this out! See that yellow streaking? This is fire blight disease. See these black spots on the orange. It’s citrus black spot disease. Man, he wanted me to become a plant pathologist so bad.”
“Thank God,” Daisy praised, “we’d have a lot of dead friends if you didn’t know your healing remedies, Shaquan.” She then looked hard at Tom. “Ballsy thing you did today, Dr. Mason. I’m glad you did it.”
Elder Buttonwood poked at the fire. “Merle got us past some hard times, Daisy. But I admit, he was reckless.”
Son of a bitch, Sam thought. You should have joined him. You allowed the dealer to pursue his whims, hurt my friend, and represented us like a tribe of chimps. He fastened his anger and passed flatbread over the elder’s shoulder, saying. “He also hurt a lot of our own people, elder.”
“Yup,” Daisy continued, “man would stick his dick in a hornet’s nest if he thought he could hump them into submission, bless his heart.”
All around the fire erupted in whoops and hollers.
“Amen, Daisy,” Shaquan said, holding his stomach. “That dog don’t hunt.”
“Christ,” Tom said and hacked deep from his diaphragm. “Any other Southernisms to share?”
Juan snickered, holding his composure. “Man, I filled up like a tick on bar-be-que.” Receiving a round of yowling mirth, he shot off a few more: “Any more protein and I’ll have a mind to doing something ugly.”
Slapping his back, Sheila egged, “Toot away, Delgado! Nothing we ladies haven’t heard before!”
Wiping tears on his sleeve, Juan could barely form words together, laughing so hard. “Girl, my father had mean pedos. You wouldn’t need to wax near him, hair ran away from the smell.”
She cried into his shoulder, “Stop, my belly hurts! I can’t laugh anymore!”
Juan tucked his cheeks back to emit an enormous smile. The campfire went quite—he was winding up for the grand finale. “My mother was balder than Jeff Bezos.”
“Oh, shit!” Sheila guffawed and rolled into Abu’s lap, beginning to hiccup. “Oh my God, oh my God, stop!”
Tom bumped Sam’s shoulder and asked, “Remember when you told your mother she looked like The Roc—”
“When I said she looked like Dwayne Johnson lifting her eyebrow? She was so pissed.” He knelt close to the fire, aerating it using a broken fishing pole. “You know, Dad, I busted your balls sometimes because you worked all day in the lab. You believed I found your job boring, but in truth, I was jealous. I always felt you were smarter than me. Never could picture myself working in a lab. It felt too…claustrophobic. Being outside was simple.”
“Sequencing genomes does not mean smarter activities. What you said back near Lake Waccamaw, it was all true. Every word. Did you know you scored grades far above me in school?”
Sam had not noticed everyone’s attention drawn between him and his dad. For a minute, it was just the two of them in front of a roaring fire under a clear, starry sky.
“Sammy, we both relish the details in different ways. I need a screen mapping out chemical traces and glowing bands. You map the frivolous swaggers of a hawk or visually document the look of concentration on a bear. You can sense when a perturbed barracuda wants to nip, and when a starfish is curious. I rely on static pictures; you read a creature’s body language. To me, the same type of intelligence.”
Looking into his dad’s eyes, Sam saw something he missed before. Tom described examples as if he were there; as if he saw every animalistic pantomime Sam had ever practiced. He had learned to understand how Sam viewed the world. Perhaps by reading his mind. It did not matter, adding to Tom’s accretion of memories was enough.
“I follow in my father’s footsteps,” Emelia confided.
Sam looked at her, ears open, and she batted her eyes, having his attention. “The green pill your father talked about yesterday, back in Bolton. My Aunt Eva created it. It’s manufactured outside of San Francisco by a friend of the Stone family. My grandfather always wanted me to take over my aunt’s work. He advocated for me to get a degree in either psychology or biochemistry. I chose psychiatry, balancing both. When I graduated, Grandpapa requested me to come out to Raleigh. He died shortly after I began situating myself in Carolina.”
“How are you following your dad’s path, Emelia?” Sam asked.
He loved to say her name. It felt warm and inviting, like the fire they shared under the night sky. Waves tumbled over Sunken Beach close by funneling between old, two-story memorials of when life was simple. Could he share his life with her? It would never be dull.
“My father wants me to take over laboratory operations.” She turned and said to Tom, who looked bewildered at her statement, “I think he feels your work is too close to Grandpapa. He hated those projects Eva led, and he didn’t want me wrapped in her experiments. He never specified where the research would be redirected, but it would be on practical things.”
“Emelia,” Tom implored, “something is changing the biota in the coastal regions. Not our mosquitos, something not seen yet. Lou and I ran missions to collect samples hoping to uncover the mystery.”
“I know,” she said. “Papa doesn’t realize I would keep you on board if promoted to Chief Science Officer.”
Sam drew patterns in the silty ground following the tempo of the conversation. He observed every detail possible without exposing the activity. Emelia pulled her hair over an ear when sharing personal stories. She did this, mentioning her grandfather. She folded her fingers under deep thought while discussing research plans. Then the gold nugget of behavior sluiced out. She nibbled on her finger to placate nervousness, observed when Dad mentioned the stomper missions.
Emelia had unconsciously drawn a knuckle between her lips and bit down.
Embarrassed? When did she bite down? If after indulging Dad and Lou, she was nervous facing Jonathon Stone. Maybe hiding doubts in her ability to convince her father, she got nervous. No, she bit down after acknowledging Dad’s belief his mosquitos were not changing coastal ecosystems. Definitely hiding information. How bad could it be? At worst, the Stones were sabotaging Dad’s experiments. Maybe switching genomic targets. Hard to fool Dr. Tom Mason. Ah, Eva’s manufacturing facility. Definitely—
Sam shook the possibility out of his pooling ideas. When everything was over, she will return to Raleigh.
“Um, Emelia…” He felt his throat tighten and his stomach twist over. “You know, after we push back the jackers, well…”
An enormous boom splintered the mood and snapped Sam’s mind tight. Above the treetops rose a yellow plume. Heads darted up like meerkats in the savannah on high alert.
“What exploded?” asked Lou.
Abu helped Sheila up and unslung his rifle. “They’re using Highway 17. Sam, we have to go.”
“Dad,” Sam said while propping up his bike, “stay here in case they try flanking on the coastline.”
“Sammy”—Tom smiled, stood and brushed sand off his legs—“I told you, we are your reinforcements. Those jackers have no idea what comes their way tonight. Watch your old man work his new skills.”
Chapter 13
Scores of wounded men and women carted past Sam carried by frantic Divers yelling garbled requests. Fear driving his pedals on an old ten-speed bike, he made towards Ogden shifting concentration between scenarios, clogged roads, and stray bullets. The jackers would spring traps on their first advance, yielding the Diver’s northern urban wasteland unabated to the secondary horde. He needed his team to slow the jacker’s human discard.
Spotter Team Coral had dug into an old school near I17. Team Barracuda positioned themselves opposite Coral in an old, dilapidated mall ignited in flames. Explosions lit around the school, warming the air and burning off humidity.