by D. J. Molles
She reached her left arm around her father’s neck and she pulled him closer to her. Pulled his head into her chest. Hugged him tightly there. He sobbed into her. The tears came off of her own face and wet the top of his gray head.
No way out.
“I’m sorry, Dad. I’m so, so sorry.”
She was operating in a blinding rush of panic now. A cornered animal. With her right hand, she pulled the small snub-nosed .38 from where she kept it under her gray blazer, and she placed this against her father’s temple.
“I’m so sorry.”
His body stiffened.
She ratcheted her arm down hard on his neck to keep him from escaping.
And then she fired a single round that killed him instantly.
NINE
─▬▬▬─
COVER-UP
Her ears rang.
She tried to scream, but she had no breath.
It’d come out of her in a rush, and she couldn’t breathe in again.
Her father’s body was still and slack in her arms. She felt the warmth of his blood rushing down her midsection. A trail of brain matter lay across her left arm where she’d held him so close. She could taste the gunsmoke.
Everything inside of her felt like it had died. She’d done the unthinkable. She’d committed to a path from which there was no coming back.
But even as she fought to take a breath, and her vision sparkled around the edges, she knew she wouldn’t have taken that bullet back.
What else could she have done?
At best, her father had become weak.
At worst, he’d become evil.
She did not want to be the type of person that was capable of killing their own father. But it was just one more thing that she would have to sacrifice. One more part of her that she would lay down, so that the small sliver of good that was left in the world had a chance to survive.
She couldn’t take it back.
She wouldn’t take it back.
Finally, her chest unlocked and air flooded her lungs.
Her head cleared. Just enough for some clarity.
She gasped a few times, the air stagnant and hot in her throat.
She jolted to her feet, and her father’s body slumped to the floor, like it was groveling at her feet. She took a few hurried steps back, and for the first time, took a good, hard look at the situation she’d created.
Colonel Staley, one of the top military men in the UES, was now shot through the head in his kitchen. Small bits of his skull were scattered across the kitchen table top. Some of that was on Claire’s left arm. When that bullet had pulverized the inside of his cranium, his nose had poured like a spigot. His face was covered in blood from his nose down.
And that blood was on Claire too. Soaking her white shirt, from her belly all the way down to the waistline of her pants.
She realized she was pulling at the blood-sodden shirt in a panic, making small, fearful noises. She was desperate to get the shirt off of her, but she was still wearing the gray suit jacket.
She didn’t know she was backpedaling until her back hit the wall of the kitchen. She stopped there, leaning hard against it and trying to recover herself again. Panic and clarity smashed into her in alternating waves.
Stop stop stop stop stop.
She got control of her breathing.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
Steady.
Think.
She needed to compartmentalize.
After a year of having filthy, sweat-stinking strangers huff their sour breath into her face and neck as they rammed themselves inside of her, she’d learned a lot about how to compartmentalize.
This was no different.
First off, she’d done what she’d had to do. There was no way around that. This was war. And Colonel Staley, father or not, was on the wrong side of it.
So she put that part of her to rest right then and there. She would not even consider it again.
Second, she was behind enemy lines, and she’d created a murder scene. The most obvious thing to do was to make it look like a suicide. She didn’t spend more than a few seconds assessing whether that was the best course of action. She’d shot him in the head. There were no forensic investigators anymore. It would be easy to cover up.
She took a few more breaths, waiting until her heart rate had slowed. A high heart rate could make thinking difficult. She needed to be clear headed.
She crossed the kitchen again, moving now with purpose. She straddled the dead body—she refused to think of it as her father now, it was only a dead body—and she hooked her arms under his and hauled up. It wasn’t easy. Claire was not a large woman.
It took nearly a minute of effort to get him into his chair again. With him slouched in the chair, she scooted it so that it was positioned in line with the blood splatter going across the table top.
She’d dropped the .38 revolver on the ground at some point. She scooped it up and stood there holding it for a moment, getting her breath back again, and thinking this through.
She’d shot him on the left side of his head.
But he was right-handed.
Shit.
A small inconsistency. It might raise suspicion, but there was nothing she could do about it now. She shucked her gray blazer off. It was the garment on her body with the least amount of blood on it. She used this to wipe the revolver down. They didn’t have forensics, but fingerprints were not hard to raise.
Handling the revolver through the cloth of her jacket, she placed this in Staley’s dead left hand. She curled the fingers around it, put the index finger in the trigger, brought it up to the side of the head where the entrance wound was, and then let the arm fall back naturally.
The revolver held in his grip, but just barely.
It hung there by his index finger through the trigger guard.
She thought it looked natural enough.
There. Okay. What next?
A note?
No. It raised more problems than it solved.
So the next thing was what the hell she was going to do with herself.
She grabbed her suit jacket and went to the bathroom.
She took a good look at herself in the mirror.
She looked terrible. Scared and frazzled. But she ignored this. She inspected herself clinically. She searched for evidence.
She started shucking off her clothes. First the blood-soaked white shirt. Then her pants. She piled these into the sink with her suit jacket. Her socks. Even her shoes.
Her belly was pink with the remnants of blood. The only item of clothing that wasn’t soaked seemed to be her bra. Even her panties were bloody. She took off the panties and put them in the sink, then decided to get rid of the bra as well.
Naked and trembling, she wet a towel and scrubbed the blood off her skin. Off her belly. Off her thighs. It was even in the thatch of her reddish pubic hair.
She put the towel in the sink, now overflowing with bloody clothing.
Took another hard look at herself in the mirror.
There. In her hair.
She leaned close and looked at it.
A single piece of gristle, or bone, or brain.
She shuddered violently, staring at it. Fought for control of herself, and then plucked it out of her hair, and flicked it into the sink amongst the clothing. Then she scrubbed those fingers on the towel, like they would never be clean again.
She left the bathroom. Naked, she stalked to her bedroom.
She stood in the doorway and stared.
The drawers of the small dresser were pulled out. She had hidden the satphone there, taped to the back wall of the dresser, behind the drawers.
Another wave of anger slammed into her.
How dare he!
It was a third and final betrayal. First, he had not come for her. Second, he had forced her to be a part of a dictatorship just like the one that she’d escaped from. And third, he’d planned to out her to them.
The fact that he was her father seemed to rise up in her again, like watching the wall of a tsunami approach. But before it could crash into her, she made it disappear.
She could not feel hurt. She could not feel betrayed.
Those feelings only made sense if she acknowledged that he was someone that she loved and trusted, and she refused to let that touch her.
This was war. And he was an enemy. That’s all there was to it.
She dressed herself quickly. Jeans and a t-shirt.
Would anyone recall what she’d been wearing for the first half of the day? Would they think it weird that she had changed outfits?
She pulled on socks, and then a pair of old, battered boots that she hadn’t worn in a very long time. She found it difficult to lace them. She grew enraged with her clumsy fingers and swore incessantly until she got them knotted.
She replaced the drawers in her dresser. Looked about the room. Found that it looked normal. Before leaving her bedroom, she grabbed a tattered pack—yet another thing she hadn’t used in the last few years.
Back in the bathroom, she shoved all the bloody clothing into the pack and closed it. Then she rinsed the ghostly bloodstains out of the sink.
She slung the pack onto her back and went to the kitchen again.
She stared at the scene for a long while, wondering if she’d missed…
Shit!
The satphone!
It was still sitting in the middle of the table.
She snatched it, buried it deep into her backpack and then stood there shaking, terrified by the fact that she’d been about to leave behind such a condemning piece of evidence. Was there anything else that she’d forgotten?
She stood there for a long time, staring at it all, looking at every detail and trying to think if there was anything else. She couldn’t believe she’d almost left the satphone.
Are you thinking clear?
Have you thought of everything?
After almost five minutes, she decided that she had.
She went to the back door and looked out. She could see the neighbor’s houses. The bit of pine trees that grew up between them. There was no one out, though. The way looked clear.
She left through the back door with her bag of evidence on her back, and made straight for Elsie Foster’s.
***
The door to Angela’s office was open, and Kurt stood outside of it. Angela was just coming back from her midday break.
When Angela saw that the door was open, and how Kurt stood outside of it, she frowned. She generally kept the door closed when she left, and Kurt’s body language was stiff. When his eyes met hers, she felt a small, hollow space appear in her gut.
Something bad happened.
Kurt nodded into Angela’s office. “Someone to see you,” he said.
Angela kept walking, though it took some effort.
She reached the door and stepped through.
Across from her, seated in one of the chairs in the room, was Nurse Sullivan.
This time, Angela did stop. She stood frozen in place, staring at the woman.
Nurse Sullivan was the one that had taken the lead on Abby’s medical care. That was the first and most obvious place that Angela’s mind went to. And here Nurse Sullivan sat, with her hands clutched in her lap, looking terrified.
Angela couldn’t breathe. Her vision swam. Hot tears flooded her eyes.
Something happened.
Abby…
Sullivan stared, as though she couldn’t understand Angela’s sudden welling of emotion, as though she were lost in her own problems…and then it seemed to snap into place. She jolted out of her chair and held out a staying hand.
“Angela, it’s not that. Abby is fine.”
Breath came back into Angela’s chest in a sudden gasp.
She felt relief, and then a hot blanket of anger.
“What the hell!” she hissed, then reached across and slammed the door to her office shut. “Don’t scare me like that, Taylor!”
Sullivan blinked a few times, and then looked down at her feet. “I’m sorry. I should have…I didn’t…”
Angela took a few stabilizing breaths.
Sullivan looked up again, and there were tears in her own eyes now.
What the hell is going on here?
“Abby is fine,” Sullivan repeated. “She’s going to be…she’s going to be just fine.”
***
Carl pushed his way into Angela’s office, his eyes taking in the scene.
Angela, hunched over her desk, looking both worried and angry.
A nurse that Carl recognized from the medical center, sitting in one of the chairs, looking nervous.
Carl closed the doors behind him.
Angela’s eyes were on him. She’d called him moments before, asking him to come upstairs from his office on the bottom floor where he’d been with Mitch, reviewing everything they knew about the Lincolnists and trying to find a weak link to start picking them apart.
Angela hadn’t told him anything. She’d just asked him to get into her office immediately.
“Ma’am,” Carl said, taking a few steps from the door, but stopping there, still unsure what he was supposed to be doing.
Angela pushed herself off of her desk. Her lips looked tight. Her eyes piercing. “Carl, this is Taylor Sullivan. She’s the nurse that’s been working on Abby.”
Carl frowned. “Is everything alright?”
What he really wanted to ask was What’s this got to do with me? but that would be cold, even for him.
Angela crossed her arms. “Well. I don’t know. Nurse Sullivan wanted you present in order to talk.”
Carl turned his gaze to the woman in the chair. Dressed in scrubs. Black bottoms. Teal top. Her hands wringing in her lap. Taylor met his gaze.
“You’re Master Sergeant Gilliard, correct?” she asked.
“I am.”
“And you’re in charge of the investigation into the Lincolnists?” Taylor’s eyes darted. “That’s what I heard.”
Carl took a few more steps into the room. He put his hands in the pockets of the khaki pants he’d changed into after arriving. He gave a slight nod. “You heard correctly. And if you know something, I’d advise you to let it out. Don’t play with fire.”
Taylor Sullivan looked at her hands for a moment. Clenched them. And then closed her eyes. Steeling herself. “I can help you,” she said. “But before I can tell you anything, I need you and Angela both to make me a guarantee.”
Carl and Angela exchanged a glance.
Angela still appeared very perturbed.
But Carl smelled blood in the water now. The Lincolnists were a tight group. They’d interviewed and interrogated as much as Angela would allow them, while still keeping with traditional due process. Nobody would say shit. They all claimed they were peaceful, and they didn’t know anything about the violence.
Perhaps the weak link that he’d been searching for was sitting right in front of him.
Was Nurse Sullivan a Lincolnist?
Anything was possible. Carl knew to keep an open mind. A good investigator doesn’t jump to conclusions.
“Well,” Carl began. “That depends on what you can offer us. And what you want in return.”
Taylor gave him a tight little shake of her head, her eyes coming open again. “No. I won’t say anything until I have your guarantee.”
Angela stirred at her desk. “You mean to say you’ll hide information from us?”
Taylor looked terrified. “No. I mean…” she took a shaky breath. “You don’t understand. I have to. It’s about…It’s about my son. I have to have your guarantee. Or I won’t…I can’t…say anything.”
Angela looked like she was about to light into Taylor, but Carl held up a hand. Let me handle this. Angela reeled herself back in and crossed her arms, eyes narrowing at Taylor.
Carl considered the situation in front of him, and then stepped forward. He chose the chair across from Taylor, and sat
down on the edge of it, leaning forward on his elbows.
“Alright,” he said. “Let’s start with what you want from us. What is it that you want me and Angela to guarantee you?”
Taylor blinked several times, and Carl realized there was the glistening of tears in her eyes. “Total immunity for me and my son. And protection.”
Carl lifted a single eyebrow. “We’ll address what you need total immunity from in a moment. For now, how about you tell me what you mean by protection. Who do you need protection from, and how do you think we’re going to accomplish that?”
Taylor’s face became blank. Like she hadn’t quite puzzled all of that out in her mind yet, and was surprised that Carl didn’t know what she meant. “Uh…I guess I mean…that you need to hide us. From Elsie Foster. From the Lincolnists.” Her eyes flicked back and forth from Carl to Angela several times. “Don’t you have a place where we can go? Where you can keep us safe from them?”
Carl considered this for a moment. There was The Complex. It wouldn’t be ideal to house civilians there, but it was a viable option to work as a safehouse, if need be.
Carl gave Angela a small nod, and then gave the same nod to Taylor. “Yes. We have a place that might work to keep you and your son safe.”
Taylor looked relieved.
“Now, let’s address what you mean by immunity.”
The look of relief fled from Taylor’s face. She swallowed hard. “I mean that no matter what I say, no matter what I tell you guys, you have to promise that you won’t hold it against me and my son. That’s the guarantee that I need from you.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Carl saw Angela gearing up to squash this. But Carl saw a way in, a weak link, the sole opportunity that he’d been granted to rip these Lincolnists apart. Angela might not like making deals with the devil, but if she wanted traditional due process, then she’d just have to swallow that and allow Carl to work with a willing informant, no matter what the informant and her son were guilty of.
“What do we get out of it?” Carl asked, before Angela could say anything.
Taylor looked frozen. Stuck. “I’m not sure I can say…I shouldn’t say anything. Not until I have your guarantee—”
“No.” Carl shook his head. “That’s not how it works, Taylor. You want us to make a deal, then you need to tell us what we get out of it.”
