Unforced Error

by Michael Bowen

  “And a few dozen or more of those men will be part of the ersatz Civil War re-enactors’ unit Jackrabbit Press is funding,” Melissa said. “With untraceable repeating rifles that there’s no record of anyone ever buying.”

  “Twenty of them armed with Spencer carbines and a Civil War field piece modified to handle rocket-propelled grenades could mount an attack in Washington, D.C. that would make the current anti-terrorism policy look like a joke,” Rep said.

  “And change a presidential election,” Melissa said.

  “Which is what the people sending you those subsidies have been planning for years,” Rep said. “Isn’t it?”

  Silence floated in the room for several seconds. Lawrence looked coolly from Rep to Melissa and then over to Linda, who seemed oddly calm. Now that she knew Peter’s innocence could be proven, it seemed, details like imminent peril to her own life lost importance.

  “Well,” Lawrence said, “I’m rather glad the professionals, as you call them, won’t be having your help in their endeavors.”

  “Oh they most certainly will have it,” Rep said, “unless I make a phone call by five o’clock this afternoon.”

  Lawrence thought for a moment, then shook his head decisively.

  “B movie stuff,” he said, looking at his watch. “No sale. You’re bluffing.”

  “If I am,” Rep said, smiling maliciously at the two goons, “they won’t come. But if I’m not, they will.”

  Chapter 26

  Sometime around four-thirty that afternoon, as he shifted for the eight- or nine-hundredth time to relieve the stiffness in his butt produced by sitting on the clammy, concrete floor of the silo, Rep realized that he was ready to die. Not that he expected to die anytime soon. Ever since one of the goons had opened the garage-type silo door and Rep had felt the rush of fetid, gassy, foul-smelling air from inside—a quick puff he’d been praying for ever since Lawrence had first mentioned the silo—he’d figured they had at least a fifty-fifty chance of pulling through this scrape.

  If the end did come in two or three or four hours, though, he felt that it wouldn’t have been a bad life and that he could accept its end without self-pity. He’d done what he wanted to do and had fun doing it. He’d eaten savory food, tasted rich wine, heard beautiful music, seen exquisite art, and said things clever enough to make Melissa laugh. He’d managed a handful of professional triumphs that left him with a feeling of modest pride. He’d finally appreciated his father, and he’d found out who his mother was. He’d shared passionate love with a good woman. If it turned out that death had an appointment with him tonight—well, he’d have died with his face to the enemy, trying to help a friend out of a tight spot. Not a bad life. And not a bad way to end it.

  Rep, Melissa, and Linda were sitting in roughly the middle of the silo floor, within the weak circle of illumination cast by a large, battery powered campground light. Their hands were still tied behind them. In the darkness near the door a guard was either sitting or standing—Rep couldn’t tell which. Rep tried to shake off some of the sweat streaming from his forehead.

  “Must be getting close to five o’clock,” he said. “It won’t be too much longer now. Couple of hours maybe.”

  “Do you think they’ll get here before Lawrence finds Peter?” Melissa asked, picking up the cue.

  “Lawrence isn’t going to find Peter.” Rep offered this part of the bluff with perfect sincerity, for he now had a pretty good idea of where Peter was, and if that idea was right Lawrence wasn’t going to come close to grabbing him. “The interesting question is whether Lawrence will wait around to be arrested or is already on his way to Yemen, or wherever he plans on running off to.”

  “Shut up,” the guard’s accented voice ordered from the darkness.

  “Just remember one thing,” Rep said to the guard in what he hoped was a friendly tone. “If they come in from the top of the silo, that’ll mean they’ve already taken care of any buddies you have outside. It’s up to you, but you might want to get out while the getting’s good.”

  Rep didn’t notice the guard’s muttered response because a thrill shot through him as he felt a slight reduction in the heat inside the silo. Even in high summer in Kansas City the sun eventually got lower in the sky, and the temperature gradually dropped as it did so. This was a matter of some importance to Rep—you might even say a matter of life and death—because what they were sitting in wasn’t just a silo. It was a Harvestore®—produced under that registered and very valuable trademark of Engineered Storage Products Company. Rep happened to know a good deal about it.

  If this were a made-for-TV movie, of course, he wouldn’t be worrying about the temperature. He would have found a conveniently jagged bolt to shred the rope binding his wrists. Then he would have overcome the guard with a bit of derring-do. After that he would have discovered cracks and crevices in the silo’s inside wall and used them to climb his way tortuously to the top, whence he could escape down the outside ladder and then rescue the ladies with some more he-man stuff on the outside.

  Harvestores®, however, don’t have jagged bolts or cracks and crevices. Like all silos, Harvestores® are filled from the top. The freshly harvested grain has to go down with as little impediment as possible. The inside walls of a Harvestore® are molten glass, bolted inside steel skin—and the specially engineered bolts have smooth, rounded heads on the inside.

  “I figure they’ll search the house first,” Rep said after he’d counted off another ten minutes. “They won’t know about the silo, of course, but if Lawrence has been insane enough to hang around it’ll all be over very quickly anyway. They’ll crack him like an egg. Even if he’s cut and run, it won’t take them long to notice this thing.”

  “Shut up,” the guard said. He didn’t say it angrily this time. His voice sounded a bit distracted, as if he were thinking of something else.

  “How long did they tell you you’d have stay here before they relieved you?” Rep asked.

  The answer was a vulgarity, offered in a tired, for-the-record tone.

  Most Americans probably have the image of silos that Lawrence had expressed: simple, phallic-shaped storage units quaintly evocative of uncomplicated rustic life. Rep had never plowed a furrow or slopped a hog, but he knew how far short of reality this simplistic stereotype fell. A well-made, well-designed silo like the Harvestore® is actually a piece of elegantly complex machinery. It doesn’t just store harvested grain. It converts that grain into something more useful, called silage. It does this in part by letting the stored grain generate certain gases which accumulate and then act on the grain.

  These gases, unfortunately, also produce heat. Unless you vent the heat, full silos have a nasty habit of exploding, killing or maiming people in the vicinity. If you do vent some of the heated gas, though, then the silo sucks in air, exactly like a pair of lungs inhaling after an expulsion of breath. Fresh air dilutes the gases, leading to loss of silage.

  The clever engineers who designed the Harvestore® had solved this problem. Their solution sat up there near the silo’s ceiling, invisible in the darkness. It was called Breather Bags®—another registered trademark. Breather Bags® are basically specially designed plastic sacks that Gargantua might have used if he’d done Paul Bunyan’s yard work. In the heat of the day, these bags deflate. As the sun goes down, though, and hot gas vents through openings put in the silo’s side for that purpose, the air being sucked into the silo through its top goes into these bags, inflating them. The bags hold the air, keeping it from diluting the gases lower in the silo.

  Rep was playing head-games with the guard because he hoped the Breather Bags® in this silo would inflate the way they were supposed to as the temperature fell. That is, he was counting on the guys who put this silo together—the salt-of-the-earth sons of toil with short necks and strong backs who watched wrestling on television and bullied people they thought would back down and called Marlboro Lights “slut butts” when they bought them for t
heir girlfriends, those guys—having done the job right.

  Another fifteen minutes—or, at least, another nine-hundred deliberate second-counts in Rep’s head—went by.

  “I was just thinking of The Maltese Falcon,” Melissa said.

  “Sure,” Rep said, picking up her cue in turn. Having limited himself to relatively simple wagers, he’d always wondered what “six-two-and-even” meant. He raised his voice slightly. “Six-two-and-even they’re selling you out, pal,” he said, echoing Sam Spade for the guard’s benefit.

  Rapid bootfalls on concrete. Visible in the pale light from roughly the waist down, the guard bolted into sight. Rep turned his head and hunched just in time to catch the boot’s sole and heel on his left shoulder and cheek instead of on his nose and mouth. A high-pitched groan escaped from him as he toppled backward over his bound hands.

  “Stop that, you bastard!” Melissa yelled furiously.

  “Bitch!” the guard spat, whirling on Melissa.

  “Don’t!” Linda screamed.

  “No!” Rep yelled, trying to warn Melissa.

  Swishh-WHOOP! A quickening rustle and then a dull, emphatic thud from the top of the silo.

  “Yes!” Rep yelped triumphantly—or as triumphantly as his undignified position allowed. “What’d I tell you? Here they are!”

  The guard checked his incipient assault on Melissa and snapped his neck upward. Bending urgently, he grabbed for the campground light. Fumbled it once, got it, turned its pale beam toward the ceiling.

  “Down here!” Rep yelled. “He has a gun!”

  Swish-WHOOP! Swish-WHOOP!

  The guard dropped the flashlight, raised his carbine and pumped four panicky shots toward the ceiling.

  POP-HISSSS!

  “Gas!” Rep yelled. “Close your eyes and push your faces against the ground!”

  Having said this, he didn’t do it but waited for a moment, looking at what he could see of the guard. The man took two uncertain steps backward.

  “Watch it!” Rep yelled then. “There’s an outside door down here!”

  The guard turned and ran into the darkness toward the silo’s perimeter. Rep tried to roll to his feet, but his head spun and he fell back. The kick had hit him harder than he’d realized. He closed his eyes tightly.

  “Control panel, right outside the door,” he whispered in Melissa’s general direction.

  She had already made it to her feet, scraping her knees and tearing her dress in the process. She saw a rectangle of light appear. The guard had opened the door. Hands still bound behind her, she moved toward it cautiously at first, as she saw the guard’s bulk blot out much of the light, and then more quickly when he had cleared the doorway.

  The center of the doorway led to what looked like a hard rubber bridge that sloped toward the ground. On either side of it a concrete sill about two feet wide ran around the silo. The guard hadn’t high-tailed it, as Rep clearly had hoped he would. He had run onto the bridge and stopped. Now he was standing there uncertainly, gazing in apparent confusion at the top of the silo.

  Melissa didn’t want to step through the doorway more than she hadn’t wanted to do anything before in her life. The pains in her arm and thigh and ribs from the goon’s manhandling of her hours before still seared her memory. But the bottom of the door was over her head, and she didn’t think she could pull it down with her chin or her teeth. Gulping hard, she stepped out onto the concrete sill and looked for the control panel.

  It was hard to miss. Eighteen inches square and mounted at eye level on the side of the silo, it stared her in the face the moment she made it onto the sill. Three very healthy-looking, silver dollar-sized push-buttons defined a row down its center. One of them, presumably, would close the door and, if God was watching and in a good mood that day, close it slowly enough for Melissa to get back inside but too quickly for the guard to follow her.

  From the corner of her eye she could see the guard turning toward her and raising his carbine. She didn’t have time to read whatever lettering was beside each button. She just closed her eyes and banged the top button as hard as she could with her forehead.

  “Ouch!” she squealed. “Dammit that hurts!”

  This rare vulgarity was lost in the most ungodly racket she had ever heard. It sounded as if every demon in Hell had picked that moment to recreate the tortures of the damned on top of the silo. She didn’t know it, but she had pushed the button opening the roof. Gears unlubricated for years screeched in protest as their teeth engaged. Metal left without paint or upkeep sheared against metal exposed to rain and sun and ice in brutal cycles.

  This got the guard’s attention. He wheeled back to look at the roof, raised his carbine, and squeezed off three more shots.

  Melissa was already picking out another button—the bottom one, this time. Bracing herself mentally, she readied her forehead for another collision with whatever industrial-strength material these things were made of. She sensed the guard turning back toward her, leveling his carbine at her.

  She snapped her head again.

  “Ouch!”

  Click! Civil War-era Spencer carbines hold seven cartridges in their magazines, and the guard had already fired seven shots. Which meant that now he’d be reaching for his revolver.

  SCREEECH! Metal on metal again, this time a few inches from her. Gears engaged, wheels turned, and the rubber bridge started to move.

  It was a conveyor belt, there to carry tons of silage from the silo to waiting trucks. It was neither fast nor intrinsically dangerous. When it was actually doing what it was there to do, farm workers would step onto it and off of it routinely to sweep or shovel out snags here and there.

  But it’s best to be ready when something under your feet starts moving, and the guard wasn’t. With a loud yelp he lost his footing and tumbled onto his back. Arms flailing as the belt moved him toward the ground, he kicked his legs in an effort to turn himself over. As Melissa watched in horror, one of the gears lurking beneath the far edge of the belt caught the ample cuff of the guard’s uniform pants. His foot and then the lower half of his leg were pulled inexorably into the moving wheels. Face contorted in unalloyed terror, the guard unloosed a shriek that would have shamed every banshee in Ireland.

  If I were as bloody-minded as I ought to be I’d let him go, Melissa thought. But she wasn’t and she didn’t. She head-banged the bottom button again.

  The machine stopped, whether because of what she’d done or because the mangled flesh inside it was more than it could handle she couldn’t tell. It was already too late for the guard, though. Three sinister mini-geysers of blood spurted at two- or three-second intervals from the distorted opening that now gaped between the edge of the bridge and its track, and then stopped. The guard’s head was thrown back, his silent mouth gaping, his eyes open but sightless. The grisly trauma, lasting perhaps five seconds, had burst his heart.

  This was the first time in her life that Melissa had ever seriously hurt another human being, but she decided to save philosophical reflections for later. She ducked back into the silo.

  “All right,” she said breathlessly, “the guard is dead and I didn’t see any others outside.

  “Good girl,” Rep said.

  “Let’s go,” Linda squealed.

  “No,” Rep said, “let’s stay here. That racket is going to draw a crowd fast, and this will be the last place they’ll look.”

  “Right,” Melissa said.

  The three of them huddled in the darkest part of the silo they could find. Melissa and Rep stood back-to-back so that Melissa could try to untie Rep’s hands. Actors in the endless run of ’fifties and ’sixties TV westerns that Melissa had watched while she was earning an A in The Male Hero Construct in Post-War American Popular Culture had repeatedly done this trick with admirable efficiency and adroitness. Often, they’d start at the commercial break and be done the moment the commercials were over. Melissa found the task considerably more daunting.
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  “Maybe I should try untying yours,” Rep said. “Are your fingernails getting in the way?”

  “Not anymore,” Melissa said. “They’re all gone.”

  “Shhh!” Linda said. “Someone’s coming!”

  They all shut up. They all stopped moving. For that matter, they almost stopped breathing. Within a few seconds, a confused hubbub of voices reached them through the door. At first they could only pick up snatches, some of it in a language they didn’t understand.

  “Look at Lou! How did they manage that?”

  “What the—”

  “Hey—”

  Then Lawrence’s voice cut through the chatter. His tone was concerned but calm and clear.

  “All right. He still has both guns and we heard the last shots less than four minutes ago, so they can’t have gotten far. They’re probably headed for the encampment. Twelve of you fan out and look for them in that direction. The other six stay here and make sure they haven’t hidden in the brush somewhere so they can sneak back to the house while our backs are turned. If anyone asks what’s going on, say it’s a patrol and ambush exercise in preparation for the battle tomorrow.”

  Without making a production of it, Melissa went back to work on the ropes around Rep’s wrists. Rep felt a sudden let-down, and he sensed that Melissa shared it. Against all the odds, they’d managed to get rid of the guard. They were comparatively safe for—what? The next thirty minutes? Forty-five at the most? At some point, long before twilight, Lawrence was going to think to look in the silo, and he could hardly help finding them when he did. Staying in the silo was the only thing they could have done. It had given them a chance. If they’d run they’d be dead. There was plenty of light, and the muzzle velocity of a Spencer carbine is more than fast enough to negate a two-hundred-second head start, especially with the added burden of Rep’s gimpy ankle. But unless Melissa got Rep untied in a hurry they were going to be right back in the soup. All they’d have to show for their improvisation and heroic effort would be a dramatic increase in Peter’s survival prospects, for it was inconceivable that Lawrence would risk hanging around much longer after he’d gotten them out of the way.