Dissolution: The Wyoming Chronicles: Book One

by W. Michael Gear

  Banks are the most leveraged businesses in the world. The irony is that if you ran a business that say, made tires, batteries, or sold electronics that was as highly leveraged, and you wanted a loan, that selfsame bank would laugh you out of the office.

  There isn’t enough capital in the system, and bank assets aren’t always liquid, like cash. Most of their assets are in bonds. They can’t unwind them overnight. And if they all tried to sell their bonds, the price of those bonds being dumped on the market would lower their value. This is called “Mark to Market” and in a major downward spiral, is the death knell.

  — Excerpt from Breeze Tappan’s Journal.

  Chapter Seven

  Sam remembered it as a kind of fantasy. He barely slept that first night. Spent most of it tossing and turning, feeling the hard ground even through the inflatable mattress he had laid out before rolling out his brand-new sleeping bag in his brand-new tent.

  Everything smelled of fresh nylon.

  Fortunately, Dr. Holly identified the eerie banshee-yodeling yippity-yipe sound that echoed down the canyon. Sam was just about to crawl into his tent when the wailing, howling chorus first sounded.

  “Holy shit! What’s that?”

  “Coyotes,” Dr. Holly said as he passed on his way to his cabin, a bottle of scotch clutched in one hand. “Bill said three packs are in the area. Don’t worry about them. They won’t get close to humans.”

  When Sam did doze off, the unfamiliar sounds of night birds—not to mention the psychotic coyote howls and the rustling of the cottonwood trees—implanted themselves in nightmares filled with Amber Sagan: The woman’s eyes were burning an insane color of blue; her abused lips curled in a grimace to expose bloody teeth. She approached out of a smoky haze, step by careful step. A long, crimson-bladed knife was gripped in her right hand.

  “I’m your only hope, Sam. Do as I say!”

  Which was when he would jerk awake, panting and sweating, heart like a trip-hammer in his chest.

  Do as she said?

  Or what? She’d hack his balls off?

  But then he always did vibrate with anxiety when he was around her.

  Even worse, periodically, when she wasn’t paying attention to maintaining her mask of flat unconcern, he had seen that scary darkness down inside her. The terrors left behind after her year of captivity in a basement outside of Raqqa. Glimpses of the tormented hell behind her eyes. A sort of madness and humiliated rage.

  Sam could well imagine what she might do under the right circumstances. Could picture it even more vividly during those wee hours of the night when the doors that led to secret terrors had been flung wide.

  And now his future depended on her? As if his family’s disapproval of his choice of education and burgeoning student loan debt wasn’t enough? Sometimes he hated graduate school and the stress it put him under.

  Grinning humorlessly, he could imagine what a therapist with a copy of the DSM-5, the psychiatric manual, would have diagnosed.

  He and the rest were rousted out of bed as dawn was turning the broken eastern horizon into a glorious pink. Overhead the sky faded into bruised purple. A few stars were still visible in the indigo west above the high country.

  The girls had a bathroom line already formed in the bunkhouse by the time Sam knocked. “Wait your turn,” was the sharp reprimand.

  Out of habit, he checked his phone for the sixth or seventh time as he settled down for the wait. No signal, of course.

  And it sank in: women and the morning bathroom?

  The way he figured, it would be more than a half hour wait. Anthropologists will tell you that this is a culturally bound stereotype. Just because it is, doesn’t make it untrue.

  “There’s always the outhouse,” Dr. Holly suggested as he passed by from the small rental cabin where he’d been staying. Apparently, he read the uncomfortable postures.

  Call it Sam’s first gesture toward western independence, but he led the way, followed by Dylan, Jon, and a sleepless and disheveled Court. After tramping through the weeds, he unlatched the door and peered in at a somewhat dusty two-holer.

  Truth to tell, Sam discovered there’s not much difference between an outhouse and a campground toilet. Like at a county softball field? Same principle. One’s wood, the other concrete. This one didn’t smell like chemicals.

  “Breakfast in fifteen minutes!” Amber announced, her voice mixing with birdsong in the clear and crisp air. “Have your gear packed and dropped off at the barn before you eat. No exceptions.”

  Breakfast consisted of eggs, pancakes, sausage, rolls from a Costco package, and hot coffee.

  Court, Ashley, and Danielle were given dishwashing duty while the rest of the students paraded over to the barn.

  Pam and Frank were waiting for them. Sam and the rest of the students swapped uneasy glances: Pam and Frank were wearing holstered revolvers. Big ones like in the movies. He had to wonder if it was for effect, part of a “Wild West” costume, a way to communicate authority, or if the Tappans actually thought they might need the things.

  They certainly hadn’t come across as the sort of people who had to have props to lend credence to their expertise. Just as he was considering that it was part of the act, Dr. Holly walked past on his way to the corrals, and Sam did a doubletake. Holly, too, had a pistol on his hip.

  Sam cast an uneasy glance up at the looming mountains. What the hell was up there that they were afraid of? Bears and lions? Maybe people? Someone, or ones, who had fled out there, beyond the tame borders of civilized society? Every bad horror movie he’d ever seen on Sci-fi Channel began doing reruns in his imagination.

  He was about to ask when Pam led the first horse up, saying, “All right, people, pay attention.”

  One by one they had first to observe and then to help with the process; each of the students found themselves intimidated in his or her own way. Horses, Sam discovered, were big, with a pungent but not unpleasant smell. And while bridles and saddles aren’t particularly complicated, it was hard to assimilate the information the first time you did it for real.

  And then came that hesitant anxiety of mounting and swinging into the saddle. Sam’s legs were spread in an unfamiliar way. At the same time, he was possessed by the awesome realization that a huge living beast was between his thighs, and it was shifting. He looked over the horse’s mane and head, past the swiveling ears. And then the thing moved. Autonomous. Thrilling him to the root of his spine.

  As they left the ranch yard, Shyla rode immediately ahead of him on a kind of bruised-red color horse. When Sam wasn’t gawking at scenery, she pretty much devoured his attention. Sitting horseback, Sam discovered, did wonderful things to a supple-woman’s waist, hips, and legs; and her golden hair caught the sunlight as it swung with each stride the horse took.

  A guy who’d grown up working in the back of a Mexican restaurant might not compete with her fabulously rich football-playing boyfriend. Still, a fella could fantasize, couldn’t he?

  He looked back where Amber rode behind him, her pinched expression adding to the severity of her wedge-shaped face. Several times she met Sam’s gaze, and Bam, it was like an electric shock that conjured visions of his nightmare.

  They headed west up the valley, following the creek past the last fence that marked the beginning of Forest Service administered lands. The trail began as something called a two-track: twin lines of tire tracks through the grass. The road ran parallel to the thick stand of willows that choked the creek bank.

  It wasn’t so bad on the first switchbacks as the trail climbed up through the trees. The horses were laboring, breathing harder, muscles bunching and saddles lurching as they climbed.

  As the novelty wore off, the various aches in hips, knees, and ankles began. Then came the burning in the butt, thighs, and calves. But the incredible views, the animals, wildflowers, the smell of the trees were a constant reminder that he was really doing this. Fucking Awesome!

  And then they filed out from the thick conif
ers into the sunlight on a bare shoulder of the mountain. Smack into another world.

  The view was spectacular. Like a whole new perspective on the mountains. Sam could see the stratigraphic layers in the uplifted geology on the slope across the valley.

  Then, after another couple of switchbacks through the timber, they emerged onto the open side of a steep slope. No more complaints. They were too terrified. Pam called back that the section of trail they were crossing was called the “slickside”.

  The trail clung to a nearly vertical incline, a narrow thread incised into the mountainside. On the left, a person could almost reach out from horseback and touch the grassy soil. On the other...? When Sam looked down past his stirrup the wash of terror started in his gut and leached up his spine to paralyze him. Just one slip, and he and his horse were going to tumble down that awful cliff. He’d bounce from rock to rock. Each impact breaking body, bones, and flesh. Even if he lived—if they could find his remains—he was going to be maimed for life.

  “Just trust your horse,” Pam and Frank kept repeating. “Stay loose,” or, “They’ve done this hundreds of times. Haven’t lost anybody yet.”

  The horses kicked loose rocks free to crash and clatter down the mountain. Sam heard Shyla whisper, “Fuck me,” in a tone and manner she’d never have used back home.

  Normally, he would have let his imagination run free with the implications; too bad he was so scared he could only buzz on the adrenaline and lipids his heart was pounding through his panicked circulatory system.

  It seemed forever to cross that length of trail. Might have been bare minutes.

  Then, suddenly, they popped out on a ridge top with a refreshing breeze, spectacular views of the rugged mountains on all sides, and the opportunity for the students to grin, chatter about how scared they’d been.

  Every muscle, joint, and bone screamed from that point forward. Thoughts of the Inquisition lodged futilely in Sam’s reeling brain. Now it was lower back and shoulders that added to the pantheon of agony. The way the skin on his butt and the inside his thighs felt, someone was grinding them down to raw meat with sandpaper.

  Even so, he’d never forget the sight of those incredible mountains as the string of riders topped out on the divide. Ridges and canyons, tree-covered, with chunks of exposed rock, wound away to a wide valley running to the south. And beyond it—a most stunning mountain range, its peaks gray, glacially sculpted into fantastic crags, cirques, and rounded eminences.

  “Wind River Range,” Frank announced. “Look the other direction. The mountains you see to the north and west are the Absarokas.”

  Sam followed Holly’s pointing finger to the alpine wonder of snow-capped crags that filled the western horizon. Height after height, sheer walls of rock, all gray, twisted, carved, and jagged. That looked like really tough country.

  “Any way across that?” Amber asked.

  “Sure. There’s trails.”

  “And what’s that peak?” Sam asked, pointing at an up-thrust pinnacle on the divide to the east.

  “Washakie Needle,” Frank told him. “Named after the Shoshoni chief.” He grinned. “The Shoshoni? Well, they had another name for it: Coyote’s Penis. Said it dated back to the Beginning Times. That when Coyote and Wolf were haggling over the rules of how the newly created world would work, Coyote managed to lose his penis. Somehow it ended up atop that mountain.”

  Shyla was giving the peak a serious study, muttering, “Doesn’t look like any penis I’ve ever seen.”

  “You’d know,” Kirstin told her.

  “And when did the Sheep Eaters move in?” Sam asked.

  Amber said, “Not everyone agrees, but I side with those who think they came in as early as six thousand years ago. In my book, they were definitely here by four thousand. Look around you, people. This was their world, and they developed a culture and subsistence pattern that remained essentially unchanged for at least four thousand years. It only ended when the last of the Sheep Eaters moved onto the Wind River Reservation ninety years ago.”

  Didn’t matter which way a person looked. The whole country was turned on its end, broken, forested, or with open meadows. Then the folded and rumpled earth gave way to the lower foothills and the sere and hazy basins before another mountain range jutted up to block the distance.

  The only tangible proof of human activity was in the long lines of contrails that crisscrossed the sky and the distant roar of high-flying jets as they periodically winged their way overhead.

  They were passing snowbanks now. White bands that lay in shadowed areas on the northern slopes. A marvel to see at this time of year. So, if there was snow still on the ground in June, what was this country like in January?

  Hard to believe that here on the high backbone of the North American continent a group of band-level hunters and gatherers had thrived, essentially unchanged, for at least four thousand years.

  Despite the pain in his body, Sam was mentally chewing on that thought when Pam reined her horse off to the side of the ridge, following a trail down into a bowl-shaped valley.

  Like a cove scooped out of the mountainside, it was bounded on two sides by stands of scrubby pines, and on the north by thick spruce and fir. The bottom looked marshy, filled with willows, tall grasses, and a spring that fed a small pool of water.

  Where the slope fell away beneath the cove, he could see canyons that incised the limestone like knife cuts.

  As though cradled in the cove, three white-canvas tents had been erected in a line, backs to the forest. Each of them looked to be the size of a small cabin; two even had stovepipes sticking up through the roofs. Equipment was neatly laid out and tarped. A fire pit out front was smoking. Talk about a cool place to camp.

  After winding down the slope, Sam was never so glad as when he swung his trembling leg over the back of the saddle. He almost collapsed onto the ground but saved that indignity for Court. The big guy was trembling, his lip quivering, tears in his eyes.

  “Take a moment and catch your breath, people,” Amber declared; she bent at the hips, hands braced on her knees. Then she straightened, walking forward as if powered by sheer will. From her expression, Sam couldn’t help but believe she’d turned off her aches and pains. That was the thing about Amber.

  They all flopped onto the cool grass, moaning, groaning, gasping and sighing.

  So this was going to be home? Sam looked around the camp. The fire ring was maybe three meters out in front of what Pam called a wall tent.

  Pam and Frank looked unfazed after the ride. They appeared to step off the horses as fresh as when they got on. Immediately, they turned their attention to the horses, untying ropes, unbuckling saddles, removing bridles.

  Amber, moving tenderly, stepped forward to help, asking what she could do.

  Damn it!

  Sam struggled to his feet, feeling unused muscles twitching and wobbling as he minced his way to add his services. Frank showed him where to carry the saddles—to a series of raised poles that he had thought were hitching racks—and how to drape them over the cross piece.

  Actually, working helped. Using his muscles and joints, he knew he would at least be able to walk.

  Amber and Sam followed instructions as they helped with the horses, then let them loose to graze, being assured that the animals would stay close to old Shiloh, and that he’d come to a whistle.

  They were halfway back to where the crew was sprawled flat when Amber stopped, her hard eyes studying Sam thoughtfully. “Thanks for offering to help.”

  “Well...sure.”

  She looked skeptically at the other males. “They don’t anymore, you know? It’s a change in the culture. We’re de-masculinizing our men. It’s really apparent when you compare Jon, Dylan, and Court to Brandon. You noticed, didn’t you?”

  “Not sure what you’re getting at.”

  Her blue stare fixed on him again, as if boring down into his soul. “You didn’t notice how they could never meet his eyes? How they seem to disappear
when he walks into the room? If Brandon is an alpha male, what’s Court? Do social rankings go down that far?”

  “That’s a bit callous, don’t you think? The guy’s a computer geek.” Made Sam wonder what Amber thought of him. “What triggered this line of thought?”

  She smiled thinly, as if at a shadowy memory. “It’s about survival, Sam. Doing what you have to. I was thinking of the doctors I worked with in Syria. Then the SEALS, Rangers, combat vets. The people who got me out of that fucking hole. That toughness of character and soul. Of being...” she seemed to go distant “...reliable.”

  “And you think modern men aren’t?”

  She snapped back to the present. “Males used to be the expendable ones. The experimental half of the species. Now we’re making them into decorations, spoiling them and turning them into pampered breeders.”

  “Pampered...what?”

  “Got to you, didn’t I? The computer age allows us to redefine masculine roles. Males still dominate business and politics. And the military. For a time.”

  “Okay, now I’m lost.”

  Her introspective gaze reminded him of an anatomist dissecting her latest specimen. “Males only make up a third of the enrolment in higher education. In the end, education and intelligence will determine who controls the power. It’s a matter of time.”

  She pointed at where the guys lay in the grass. “I rest my case.”

  Ashley had been one of the first back on her feet. She’d been followed by the rest of the girls. Sam wouldn’t have thought a thing of it, but Ashley was carrying cans of soda to Jon, Court, and Dylan where they reclined in apparent luxury.

  “That doesn’t mean—”

  “Just something for you to think about,” a beat, “anthropologist.”

  She uncharacteristically slapped him on the shoulder as she marched past and headed for the cook tent. As he followed, he heard her call, “All right! Who’s willing to volunteer? Pam needs a hand getting supper set up.”

  Ashley, Danielle, and Shyla lifted their hands. Shanteel and Kirstin were still looking around with owl eyes, but after a moment’s hesitation, both marched stiffly toward the tent.