by Ron Ripley
“We’ve had the second patrol come back in,” Jane explained. “The third is still out there, but we still don’t have any idea as to where she might be.”
“Damn it,” David grumbled.
“What’s the next step?” Luis asked.
“We have two next steps,” David said. “Luis, you’re going to New Hampshire. We’ve got to follow up on the lead we received. The professor wants another house. Not a building or a business, but a real home. There’s supposedly one in Nashua, New Hampshire, so you’re going to go and check it out.”
Luis frowned and said, “It’s not abandoned, is it.”
“Nope,” David confirmed. “Intel on the property states there’s a trio of occupants. All male. From what we know, though, this place has an unbelievable amount of ghost activity. You’re to go and make the buy.”
“And if they don’t want to sell?” Luis asked.
“That’s not an option,” David said. “Boss has a hankering for this one, so this is the one we’re going to get. Take Ivan and Gayle with you. More if you need them.”
Luis shook his head. “No, shouldn’t be an issue. I mean, if those two can’t convince someone to sell, well, we’ll be hiding the bodies and moving on to the next of kin.”
David nodded. “Good. Get on it, now. I want you three out with the dawn, weather permitting.”
“Got it,” Luis said. He stood up and left the room silently.
“What fresh hell do you have for me?” Jane asked, her face dark and her lips pressed close together.
“You know,” David said, sighing.
“Say it,” she replied, her voice stiff.
“Boss wants you to go after the woman as soon as the third team gives its sitrep,” David said.
“That’s bull, David,” Jane snapped.
“I don’t disagree,” David said, “but it’s what the boss wants, and that’s what he is, our boss.”
She muttered under her breath, and David didn’t ask her to repeat herself.
“David,” Jane said, “I’m not low on the totem pole here. This should be tasked to someone else. Hell, I haven’t tracked anyone in years. And not in this crap!”
“We’ve had two teams fail, and the third team is coming up dry,” David stated. “You’re the best tracker we have, and this shouldn’t be a rough assignment. The woman’s almost a cripple.”
“A cripple who’s stayed ahead of the game,” Jane said angrily.
“This isn’t a democracy, Jane,” David said firmly. “You are the best option. The boss wants you on it. Therefore, this is what you’re doing.”
“We have no one else who can track?” she demanded.
“We do,” David admitted.
“Then put them on it!” she yelled.
“Can’t,” David said.
“Why the hell not?” Jane spat.
“Because Timmy’s in the Village,” David said.
He watched the emotions war across her face.
There was pride at being compared to Timmy in ability, but the anger at being tasked with such a menial job won out.
“This is stupid,” she said, pushing herself away from the table angrily. “Is this a bag and tag mission, or am I supposed to bring her back?”
“Bring her back,” David said. “Boss wants to use her as leverage.”
“Stupid!” she snapped, jabbing a finger at him.
“Jane,” David said severely. “I have a corpse in Christopher’s house. A corpse I can’t even retrieve yet.”
She paused and glared at him, waiting for him to continue.
“Annabelle Rice decided to take a stroll into the Village,” he said coldly. “The professor said her body is of secondary importance until we get the escaped subject back. I don’t like leaving a body any longer than I have to.”
“Sentimental now, David?” she snarled.
“Practical,” he replied. “If she decides to come back as a ghost, we’ll have one more dead person to contend with. So, I don’t want any more crap. Get your gear together.”
Jane swore as she stormed out of the room, leaving David alone.
He got to his feet, stretched, and left the ready room. His stomach rumbled as he closed the door.
Need to eat, he thought, and then I need to look at the footage of the boy again.
David’s night wouldn’t be finished until he worked out a plan to kidnap the boy.
Grabbing him won’t be hard, David thought, nodding hello to a pair of guards on their way to their shift.
No, the real challenge will be making sure I don’t lose half a team to Timmy in the process.
Timmy, he knew, was more than capable of killing them all.
He’ll enjoy it, too.
Chapter 3: Wondering
“What are you thinking about, Pop?” Timmy asked.
Marcus took his pipe out of his mouth, relit it and replied, “Joyce.”
His son nodded.
“She’s okay,” Alex said from where he lay by the hearth.
Both Marcus and Timmy looked at the boy.
He has more silver in his hair, Marcus realized.
After the events with Nathaniel and the Huron warriors, the boy’s hair had begun to change color, strand by strand, a few more each day. His eyebrows were already silver, and there were crow’s feet around his eyes, which had lost some of their youthful innocence.
“How do you know?” Timmy asked.
Alex shrugged. “I don’t. I just think she’s going to be okay, you know?”
“Nope,” Timmy said.
Marcus exhaled a mouthful of smoke and said, “I wish I could agree with you, Alex, but I must confess, I do not have any sense of how Joyce is faring.”
Alex closed his book, stretched and sat up.
“I think she’s fine,” Alex said. “I know it won’t be easy for her. But it won’t be too hard. Not as hard as she thought it would be. She knows more than they do. A lot more.”
“I’ll take your word for it, kid,” Timmy said, and the man’s tone was serious.
“As will I,” Marcus said, smiling. “Now, it’s almost time for bed. We have a good deal of ground to cover tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Alex said. “I’ll get ready.”
The boy stood up and left the room, humming to himself.
“Kid’s got a great attitude,” Timmy said.
“He does indeed,” Marcus agreed. “What are your thoughts on tomorrow?”
“We need to start clearing these houses,” Timmy said. “That’s it, in a nutshell.”
Marcus frowned. “Why?”
“All these ghosts Worthe brought in,” Timmy said, “you know they can leave their homes. Just because they can’t get into ours, doesn’t mean they won’t be out there, waiting for us. Worthe will continue to drop off supplies. He still wants to figure out a way to use you. I mean, that’s what I figure.”
“As do I,” Marcus said. “I was hopeful our new allies might be able to assist us with the containment of Worthe’s ghosts.”
“I wouldn’t count on them,” Timmy said. “I mean, they might for Alex, but not you and me. They like the boy. He talks to them in their own language, took them to war even. Hell, what soldier wouldn’t like that?”
Marcus could only nod his agreement. After a moment, he said, “Do you know anything of the ghosts inhabiting the other buildings here in the Village?”
“Yeah, a little,” Timmy said. “To be honest, though, I didn’t pay that much attention to it.”
“Honesty is preferable at this point,” Marcus said with a small smile. “Well, we will have to decide which ghost to tackle first then.”
“My money is on Christopher,” Timmy said.
“Who is he?” Marcus asked.
“The nutjob in the cape,” Timmy replied.
“Bad?” Marcus asked.
“Terrible,” Timmy said.
A cold feeling settled in Marcus’ stomach at his son’s pronouncement. It felt as though a multitude
of horror was left unsaid.
Chapter 4: Moving through the White
Like all the others, Joyce heard them long before she saw them. Their blundering through the snow gave her ample warning to sink lower into her hiding place. She peered out of her concealed position and waited for them to appear.
A single person stepped into view first, clad in a stark white set of fatigues that was too bright against the snow that blanketed the forest. The unknown Worthe employee walked haphazardly through the snow, unused to the snowshoes they wore. As the person drew closer, Joyce saw it was a woman, her shotgun slung across her back instead of in her hands.
When the woman passed out of view, two more people in white appeared, following the first woman’s trail. Like her, they wore snowshoes and had their weapons slung. Their shoulders were hunched against the cold, heads drooping.
Joyce read their body language easily, seeing they were far more interested in finishing their search than in finding her.
As soon as they had passed by, the last member of the four-person team arrived. This one was taller than the other three, moving easier on his snowshoes. But like his teammates, his weapon was slung.
The man paused, looked left and right, and then stepped closer to Joyce’s position.
She held her breath, her heart thundering in her chest.
He came to a stop less than a foot from her, turned his back to her as he stepped closer to a tree. She heard him grumble and mutter before his radio squawked.
“Hold up,” he snarled. “I need the latrine. I’ll be back on track in a minute.”
“Hurry it up,” a female voice said. “I want to be heading back before nightfall.”
He swore under his breath, and as he did so, Joyce stood up silently, snow falling from her as she drew her knife.
“Damn buttons!” the man spat.
She drove the blade deep into his back, the knife angled upward as she took his chin in her free hand and pulled his head back. His breath rushed out of him as a low gasp, and she jerked the weapon out and cleanly cut his throat.
Joyce let go of the fresh corpse, blood steaming where it fell in the snow. She wiped the blade on his back, stripped him of his utility belt and strapped it on her own waist. Quietly, she hastily covered his body with a thin layer of snow before she brushed out her own steps and returned to her hiding place.
Joyce drew his pistol, made certain the weapon was loaded and waited.
The radio crackled unintelligibly beneath the snow and the man’s body. Several more times it went off, and she waited.
Within a few minutes, Joyce saw all three of the remaining members of the team. They were spread out, weapons at the ready. Two served as lookouts as they scanned the forest around them while the third backtracked.
Joyce took a deep breath, waited until the lookouts peered in opposite directions, and then fired.
Her shot took the tracker in the face, knocking the small woman backward and into the snow. The remaining two dropped down into prone positions, but it didn’t matter. Joyce saw them perfectly, and she killed them both with single shots.
She hastened out of her hiding place, holstered the weapon and limped out to the bodies of the other three. In silence, she stripped them of their spare ammunition, found a pair of snowshoes that fit, and resisted the temptation to take one of their radios.
They’ll track me if I do that, she thought, stripping the coat off one of the men. She shrugged off her pack, pulled the coat on over her own, and then replaced her pack. She removed the coat from the woman, put on the snowshoes, and then limped away from the bodies.
After nearly fifteen minutes of walking, she stopped and got her bearings before tying the arms of the coat to her pack. The garment hung down to the snow, and as she walked, it brushed away the tracks of the snowshoes.
Joyce walked another ten minutes before she turned to the left and walked for another ten minutes. She paused, her leg aching, and glanced up at the sky. A thick, gray bank of storm clouds had rolled in since the sunrise, and it looked as though it might snow again.
Another half hour or so, she thought. I’ll rest then. Make another camp, see what the weather brings.
With her decision made, Joyce started along again, her steps slow and steady, the stolen coat hiding her trail.
***
They used the GPS locators in the radios to find the third team.
Snow was falling as David walked from body to body, examining the corpses. The three bunched together had all been shot. Denise, the team leader, had taken a round to the face, a neat hole beneath her left eye. Paul and Larry had the tops of their heads blown off.
It took longer to find Mel, but that was because the woman had covered his body.
After she had stabbed him from behind and cut his throat.
“She’s a worker,” Jane said grudgingly.
“She’s a hell of a shot,” David said bitterly.
“Why this team?” Jane asked. “Why not the other two?”
David nodded towards Mel.
“His fly is halfway unbuttoned,” David explained. “Looks like he was taking a quick pit stop.”
Jane squatted down, looked at the snow behind the body and said, “David, look.”
He followed the line of her finger, and less than two feet away was a depression in the snow.
“She was here,” Jane said, nodding at where the woman must have been laying. “I bet she was going to let them walk right by, just like the first two teams. But then Mel came over to use a tree, and she took the opportunity to thin out our numbers.”
“She took Paul’s coat, too,” David mused, looking back at the trio in the snow. “And Larry’s snowshoes.”
“Looks like Denise’s coat as well,” Jane said, frowning.
“Why do you think she took that?” David asked.
Jane shook her head, opened her mouth to speak, and then she pressed her lips together tightly.
“What?” he asked.
“She’s hiding her tracks,” Jane said with grudging admiration. “She’s going to go where she needs to, and she’s going to drag that damned coat behind her, making sure we can’t track her easily.”
“Damn it,” David muttered. He glanced at the trees and the snow. “What about bringing a chopper in? Search for a heat source.”
Jane shook her head. “Nope. This one’s not stupid, David. My guess is she’ll stick close to places where deer like to bed down. We’ll get readings, but we won’t be able to pinpoint her. If the boss didn’t want her alive, we could just carpet bomb the whole area.”
“Yeah, not an option,” David said angrily. “Well, it’s time for you to get to work.”
Jane looked at him in surprise. “What? Now?”
“No time like the present,” he said. “I took the precaution of having your gear packed and ready. Get suited up and on the warpath, Jane. I want sitreps every hour during daylight.”
“David,” she said angrily. “I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”
“I know,” he said. “But that’s too bad. You have a job to do, Jane. I suggest you get it done.”
David turned and walked away from her, waiting for the bullet he knew she wanted to put in his back.
It never came.
Chapter 5: Scouting out the Neighborhood
“Is everything all right out there?” Marcus asked.
Alex looked up at him, smiled, and nodded. “Yeah. Why?”
Marcus ruffled the boy’s hair and said, “I merely wished to know. Timmy and I will go across the street soon, and I don’t want there to be any more trouble than we’re already planning for.”
“I don’t know about inside the house,” Alex said, his face becoming serious, “but none of the Huron warriors are going to bother you.”
“No?” Marcus asked.
“No,” Alex said. “I told them not to.”
Although Marcus knew the boy did not speak in jest, he still looked at the child in surprise.
“They more than sort of listen to you, Alex,” Marcus said. “I am quite impressed with your ability to communicate with them.”
“It’s strange, isn’t it?” Alex asked.
“It is,” Marcus confirmed. “But it is not a bad thing. You said the woman Meredith could speak with them as well, and this is also something Timmy has spoken of.”
“Yeah, but she’s older,” Alex said. He paused before he added, “I wish I could see her again. She was nice.”
Timmy entered the room and came to stand beside them at the window. He glanced to the right, peering at the gate. “Have they tried to come in?”
Marcus and Alex shook their heads in unison, and Timmy laughed.
“I don’t know if that means they’ve given the Village to us for now,” Marcus said, “or if they’re biding their time.”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Timmy said. “It could go either way. Considering Worthe’s passion for the two of us, though, I think it’s a matter of time before he comes in to clean us out. Or at least reassert his dominance here.”
“Regardless,” Marcus said, “I suppose it’s time we go across the street and see what’s waiting for us.”
“Do you want me to come with you?” Alex asked, a hopeful note in his voice.
“No,” Marcus said. “I want you to stay here. Elaine will be with you, and I trust your ability to speak to the Huron warriors will enable you to remain safe. The same cannot be said about crossing the street.”
“I don’t think Marcus should go either, kid,” Timmy said. “He’s still got that bum arm.”
Marcus felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment over his injury.
“But,” Timmy continued, “it seems my Pop is as stubborn as I am. So, we’re going across the street. You just keep an eye out for us, okay?”
“Yeah,” Alex said, his face brightening. “I’ll do that. I promise.”
“I know you will,” Timmy said.
In silence, Marcus and Timmy put their winter gear on and opened the door to the cold afternoon wind. The gas lights, which remained permanently lit since the dead had chased Worthe’s forces out of the Village, pushed back against the gray light of an approaching storm.