When all that was finally done, the main guard handed us two badges that said “Visitor” in blood-red letters.
“Pin these on. Drive straight ahead to the tall black building and check in at the front desk. They’ll know what to do with you there.”
I handed the kid his badge as the gates creaked open. He mouthed “What – the – fuck” at me and I shrugged.
We drove through the facility, past Dark Sky officers drilling young recruits. It reminded me of Parris Island, the Marines facility located down in South Carolina. My brother signed up with the USMC during the Vietnam War and my parents took me to his graduation from boot camp. There were a lot of angry drill sergeants yelling at a lot of sweaty recruits everywhere on the base. This was similar, only this was no official military organization, this was a private company playing soldier, getting ready for their own for-profit wars.
The streets here were paved, wide, pristine and clean. In fact, everything was pristine and clean at this place, since it couldn’t have been more than a few years old. Andrew Wright had certainly directed a few billion towards its construction and, at the same time, made sure it was so far off the grid that people could easily disappear here. The Day of Struggles wouldn’t have a chance.
We arrived at the black building, which had a huge Dark Sky logo rotating on the roof. I parked in front of it. A few seconds later, the entrance doors automatically opened and we entered the belly of the beast – and it was a magnificent belly, I had to say. The lobby was three stories tall with a giant black metallic – what else? - American Eagle covering the forty-foot back wall. Under the eagle, a receptionist sat at a long black granite desk, patiently waiting for us to cross the length of a football field that stood between us and him. He was another humor-deprived young man in a blood-red uniform.
“Mr. Bowman and Mr. Longetti?”
We nodded in unison as we walked towards the desk.
“So, that town or whatever it is down the road,” I began. “What’s…”
“Mr. Bowman, I’m going to ask you to turn around and walk back out of the building. You’re to be taken to The Barn.”
“The Barn?” I asked. “Are we to be milked?”
“It’s the name of the building in the back of the facility.” He craned his neck to look past us and through the glass entrance doors. “As a matter of fact, your vehicle is here.”
We turned. It was a black SUV identical to the fleet we encountered in Branson – not exactly a surprise to either of us. We turned and started to head back out the way we came in.
“Um, no, Mr. Longetti, you’re to remain here.”
PMA turned back to the receptionist.
“You’ll be…” The receptionist reviewed his computer screen with a slightly confused expression, then looked up again. “…someone will be meeting you here shortly.”
The kid looked at me.
“It’s their ballpark,” I said. “Wait here. I’ll be okay.”
I turned and headed out to the waiting SUV. I really didn’t know if I was going to be okay. It wasn’t a good sign that they were splitting us up, but I assumed this was to safeguard the kid, which I was all in favor of.
The driver of the SUV was yet another young gentleman in a Dark Sky uniform with a serious case of being serious. He had me get in the back seat and drove towards the back of the facility, past all the barracks, a mess hall, a few other one-level office buildings, a gymnasium, their equivalent of a PX store…and then, into the weeds. We had driven through a back gate in the tall metal fencing and were now driving through the wild grass, because there was no real road back here, just vegetation that had been run over a couple hundred times until it formed a path of sorts.
The only thing back here was The Barn.
We came over a small hill and there it was, all by its lonesome, about a hundred feet or so ahead. I assumed it was The Barn, it sure as shit was shaped like a barn, even though it was jet black and appeared to be made of solid steel. We drove around the back of it to where two other lookalike SUVs were parked, pulled up beside them and stopped. My driver helpfully pointed out a nearby door, I got out of the vehicle and thanked him. He said nothing in return.
I had the feeling the Dark Sky support staff knew that a trip to The Barn never meant anything good.
As the SUV backed up, turned around and headed back towards the main facility, I breathed in some of the Montana air. It was clean and refreshing. I took in as much of it as I could.
I was stalling. And frankly, I wished I smoked. This would be the time to have one last cigarette, fuck the clean and refreshing Montana air.
A couple of moments later, I headed for the door and knocked on it when I reached it. I wasn’t sure what else to do, there wasn’t a doorbell, an intercom, written instructions, or even a welcome mat.
A voice from inside yelled, “It’s open!” So I opened it and walked inside.
It took my eyes a minute to adjust to the darkness inside after the bright sunlight outside. When I could finally see clearly, the first thing I locked on was a glass display case mounted on the wall to my right filled with…
…tomahawks?
That’s when something rammed me in the gut and drove me to my knees.
Oh, fuck, the party was starting.
When I looked up to see what had hit me, the same something whacked me in the back of the head and took me all the way down to the floor on my stomach.
That was going to leave a mark.
My eyes had to refocus yet again from the attack to my skull. When they did, I looked up at the walls of the Barn and saw that they were festooned with all sorts of mounted medieval weaponry. Battle axes, maces, quarterstaffs, war hammers…and a lot of other scary things that I didn’t know the names of. I also noticed the floor I was lying on had the occasional dried stain here and there. The stains looked like they were comprised of dried blood. And the more I looked for them, the more I found.
I got up on my elbows to see what had walloped me. My guess was right - not that I was happy about it.
There was Not-Quite Connors leading with his rifle butt, which had doubled me over and then knocked me down. He repositioned the weapon so he was holding it in one hand, rifle barrel pointing at me.
“Hello, Herman,” I said weakly.
That seemed to startle him for a moment. But he quickly snapped back into angry psychopath mode.
“Get up,” he snarled.
He flipped his rifle around to cock it and make a point. I adjusted my rumpled Banana Republic jacket and slowly got to my feet. I felt behind my head. A little blood? I tasted my fingers.
Yep, blood.
Herman looked at me with his piercing blue eyes.
“How do you know my name?”
”To be fair, I only know half of it. By the way, who’s your plastic surgeon? Can he make me look like Chuck Connors? Actually, I think I’m more of a Mike Connors guy. Remember him? Mannix? Great theme song.”
He approached me, pushing his rifle barrel towards me threateningly.
“Remember what I told you in Branson? You answer to me,” Herman said with his jaw set, apparently by a very talented plastic surgeon. “I told you to stop. You didn’t. Now you’re mine.”
“Herman, I know you’re not going to kill me. I don’t know why you’re not going to kill me, but you’re not.”
He seemed to want to convince me otherwise and in the worst way possible. He dropped his rifle down against his hip, Lucas McCain style, and shot towards me. The bullet whizzed by my ear so closely it felt like a gentle whisper of a breeze. Whatever the wall was made of behind me, it absorbed the bullet like a sponge.
More proof that anything goes inside The Barn.
He kept shooting.
One bullet went by my other ear, another by my left arm, another by my right arm and another over my head.
I didn’t actually piss my pants, but a few drops might have snuck out.
“H-H-Herman, stop. We’ve discussed th
is.”
Emerging from the darkness was none other than Mr. Barry Filer, wearing one of his Joseph A Bank suits. I was actually happy to see him, and it took him stopping someone from shooting me in the head to elicit that positive reaction.
“Barry, what the hell? You said I wouldn’t be hurt and I’m bleeding from the back of my head,” I said with more than a little irritation. “And where did you take Jeremy?”
“WE ask the questions,” said Herman.
“D-d-don’t worry about the boy,” said Mr. Barry Filer.
“Worry about yourself,” said Herman.
Mr. Barry Filer tentatively reached over and pushed Herman’s rifle barrel down so that it wasn’t pointing at my head. Which I appreciated.
“Y-y-you were told not to be so aggressive, Herman.”
Herman took a few steps back, but he wasn’t done with me.
“Why’d you bring that kid with you?” he barked. “What the FUCK are you up to?”
“Not a whole lot, cowboy,” I replied, “And you?”
My abdomen ached and my head was killing me, but I wasn’t going to let them know, that would give them some power. I learned that early on, when my oldest brother hit me in the stomach as hard as he could for no damn reason. That’s when I made a promise to myself not to let him see me cry and he left the room looking empty and disappointed. So I was going to put on a show here as long as I could. If they saw I was scared, they would try to get away with anything they could.
I again eyed all the bizarre and cruelly primitive weaponry mounted on the walls.
“What do you boys do in here anyway?”
“W-w-we have advanced weaponry classes here, if that’s what you mean,” said Mr. Barry Filer. “W-w-we pride ourselves on providing training at the highest level here at Black Sun. That can get a little n-n-nasty.”
“I could tell by the bloodstains. So did Claude Bachman get his samurai sword from you guys?”
Herman laughed again. Who knew he had a sense of humor?
“That loser?” he said with a roar.
“I-i-it was a gift,” Mr. Barry Filer replied quietly. “To reward him for watching the road.”
“To get him to shut the fuck up,” was Herman’s version.
“You’ve acquired quite a following down the road there,” I went on.
“They’re harmless,” said Mr. Barry Filer. “P-p-people understand what we represent.”
I once again eyed the bloodstains, the instruments of death and Herman glaring at me with his rifle ready at his side to blast me full of holes the moment management gave him permission. And I couldn’t help but think all that was represented here was some kind of sadistic nightmare.
And that’s also when I saw a figure come out of the shadows behind Herman – a figure holding a mace.
A mace that came slamming down right on top of Herman’s Stetson.
Mr. Barry Filer turned with a start as Herman fell to the ground. His turn to bleed from the head.
That’s when I noticed the figure holding the mace only had one hand to hold it in.
He looked exactly as Michael Winters had described him. A leather covering over the left side of his face, the left arm missing, head shaved and, unlike Herman who was into Western cosplay, wearing an official Dark Sky blood-red uniform. He had a Browning Hi Power 9mm pistol resting in a holster on his right hip – and – of course – the mace in his hand.
He turned to Mr. Barry Filer, who was in the middle of experiencing a severe almost-burp.
“Where’s my nephew?”
“Richard, I-I-I have no idea of what you’re talking about.”
Richard?
“Filer, I can access the entry logs, I know he’s here.” He turned to me. “You Bowman?”
I nodded slowly.
“Let’s get out of this fucking torture chamber.”
Robert Davidson threw the mace to the floor, and grabbed me by the arm, ushering me towards the exit. Once outside, we got in his SUV and I rode shotgun.
“Why did you bring my nephew here?” he demanded to know as we drove up over the ground Rat Patrol-style back to the base.
“Your nephew doesn’t take no for an answer. He’s a good kid. You’d know that if you were still alive.”
He gave me a hard look.
“But I’m not, am I?”
He stopped at the back gate and talked to the guards, asking them if they knew the kid’s whereabouts. They shook their heads with their serious faces. Nobody knew anything. He had them call the reception desk in the big black building. All they knew there was Herman had picked up PMA.
Herman.
Robert Davidson revved the motor and took a few turns until we were suddenly in a small neighborhood of modest bungalows. He screeched to a halt in front of one of them and got out. I followed, not sure what to do and still a little goofy in the head from Herman’s rifle butt, not to mention the insanity that was swirling around me. This was like one of those nightmares I had been having before I got here, only there was no way to wake up from this one.
Robert marched up to the front door. Locked. He pulled out his 9mm pistol and fixed that problem with a well-placed shot, then kicked the door in.
And then came the real nightmare.
The kid was in there all right, sitting on the sofa and looking stunned for good reason. He was the only visitor to what was for all intents and purposes the world’s only Rifleman museum. There were framed pictures of Lucas McCain all over the living room - stills from the show, framed Rifleman comic book covers, and a wall-length poster of Chuck Connors himself shooting at an onlooker. Not only that, but there were large mounted video screens on each wall, each playing a different episode of The Rifleman, as well as a display case of old Rifleman toys from sixty years ago – which included a board game. I wondered what you had to do in order to win, make it out alive?
“Let me guess,” I said. “Herman’s place.”
But Robert Davidson didn’t respond. He was staring at the kid, the kid he hadn’t seen in over a decade, staring at him as if he were mentally measuring everything he had lost by playing dead all these years.
“Uncle Robbie?” the kid said tentatively.
Uncle Robbie couldn’t bring himself to speak. He motioned to the boy to get up and follow him back out the door. We got back in the SUV, drove not far down the same street and stopped at another bungalow, his bungalow.
Inside the small modest home, he motioned for us to sit down. We did.
“You shouldn’t have come here.”
“I didn’t have much of a choice,” I replied. “Management was insistent.”
“Management,” he muttered.
And then he looked down at the Dark Sky shirt he was wearing and, with one savage move, used his one hand to physically rip it apart, leaving the shredded cloth hanging on his torso like he was an old Doc Savage paperback cover.
“Why did you bring my nephew here?” Robert asked again. “Why did you bring family into this?”
“I made him bring me,” said the kid.
“Besides,” I said, “Isn’t this all about family?”
He glanced out the window with a sigh.
“I’ll never have a fuckin’ family. I’ll never have a fuckin’ life.”
“They called you Richard back there. That your name now?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said bitterly. “Herman suggested it. Richard Kurtz.”
“Like Colonel Kurtz – Apocalypse Now.”
“That’s what I thought until Herman started calling me ‘Dick.”
“Dick Hurts,” I said with a wince. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah. Herman thought it was a pretty funny joke,” Robert said, nervously glancing out the window again.
“Speaking of Herman, what’s the deal with that guy? Why is he allowed to run around beating and killing people whenever he feels like it?”
Robert said nothing. He kept staring out the window.
“Why does he have so much po
wer around here? I would think a loose cannon like that – okay, a loose rifle like that – could bring a place like this down.”
Again, nothing.
“And what, are you a prisoner here? Why not just leave? Your father wants you home. That’s why he hired me, you know.”
That made him turn back to me.
“Think my father wants to see me like this?”
He pulled off the leather covering that hid half his face. The kid and I both let out an involuntary gasp.
What was under there wasn’t pretty – it was gnarly, like he had smeared cheese on that side of his face and then dropped some rats on it to chew it to pieces. It was something you wouldn’t let the kids see because it would give them nightmares.
“You know, there are plastic surgeons. Herman must know a pretty good one,” I offered, trying to pretend I didn’t want to turn and look in a direction where his face wasn’t.
“You don’t understand. We both choose to look like this.”
“Why…”
“Because of the plan.”
“Plan?”
“We were going to run a campaign of psychological terror in Afghanistan. We would change our appearances to become living embodiments of evil. We’d be so scary that the rebels would shit their pants if they even saw us. We called ourselves ‘The Demonic Duo.’ Clever, huh?”
“Yeah, but how come you had to be the…”
“The ugly one? The one that would send kids running screaming into the night? Because I was the one who was lucky enough to step on the roadside bomb.”
He leaned against the wall and put his hand up to his head as if he had the migraine to end all migraines. I looked at PMA to see how he was coping with all this. The answer? Not well.
“I’m a sick fuck, Bowman, a very sick fuck, and I have been for a long time. But Herman said we’d be sick fucks for America, and that seemed like a good use of my talents.
“But why The Rifleman?”
“The Rifleman could go out and massacre a half-dozen guys, then go home and teach his son good family values, all in thirty minutes, not counting commercial breaks. Meaning you could be a really fine, upstanding, moral sick fuck. That’s why Herman loves that show, Bowman, that’s why he decided to make his face look like The Rifleman’s, so he could feel like a hero, no matter what kind of fucking sick fuck shit he and I did. And we did a lot of it, let me tell you, a whole lot of sick fuck shit.”
Dark Sky (The Misadventures of Max Bowman Book 1) Page 18
