by Ryan Harding
“They couldn’t figure out from the bodies it had something to do with Agent Orange?” Gin asked.
“How? They’ll be found weeks, months, maybe years from now in faraway places, probably in rivers or woods, places terrible for the preservation of forensic evidence—or for the body staying in one piece.”
Adam almost joked about Orange getting a “head start” with that, remembered his parents, and shut his mouth.
“They know what they’re doing. The state of the bodies will dictate the array of possibilities for disposal. He’ll never get the credit for killing us. Sure, it will obviously be murder, but the how, when, and why of it will remain a mystery that points everywhere but here.”
“Think he’s upset his official body count is way off?” Adam asked.
Patrick looked annoyed by the question. “Shush, the grown-ups are speaking.”
Okay, then…dickhead. It stung, knowing Patrick obviously considered him dead weight.
“Even if every corpse is entered in ViCAP, Orange doesn’t have a signature other than head and ear removal and even then he removes heads in different ways.” Patrick shrugged. “I’m sure our abductors can deal with tool marks on the vertebrae.”
Gin turned to Adam and said, “Violent Criminal Apprehension Program,” making it one less acronym he would go to his grave not knowing. Actually, it was kind of impressive she knew what it meant, just another reminder she was far in advance of him. Once out of high school the experience gap increased exponentially. The years became a chasm.
“By now we’re the final three,” Patrick said as he handed Adam a couple pairs of jeans. “So we need to be thinking about what happens once we deal with Orange.”
“We’ve got a glorified Molotov cocktail and shoestrings, and he knocked you on your ass the first time. You sure are taking the whole ‘deal with him’ thing for granted.”
“Hold that thought.” He abruptly set off in the direction of the Ardwar Sto.
Adam sorted through the pants. They were different sizes since Patrick didn’t know what would fit.
“He’s full of shit. Didn’t offer to show us any of those mysterious tracking devices, did he? You’re better off in those pants, though. Briars and poison ivy will tear you up in the woods.”
Instead of the hardware store, Patrick went to the post office box. He circled it a couple of times.
“It kind of makes sense if you think about it,” Adam said, checking tags. One of the pairs was his size. Did they really have tracking devices in their underwear? He couldn’t see Patrick convincing Gin this so-called recovery team had a line on her unmentionables.
Adam continued, “They dressed us in our own clothes, but they picked the brightest or goofiest things we own. We thought they did it to make us more of a target, but what if they did it because they didn’t want us to question the real motive?”
“We weren’t naked when they took us,” Gin said, “Why not sew the things into those clothes so we didn’t question it at all?”
“Because they can’t dump our bodies in clothes with those devices inside,” Adam said. He kicked off a new shoe and removed a sock so he could hold it up to the moon. “A murder investigation would turn up anything out of the ordinary in our clothing.”
“Yeah, I guess our consummate pros couldn’t deal with just taking them off when they dump the bodies.”
Adam couldn’t find anything in his sock. He crumpled the fabric between his fingers in case he could feel what he couldn’t see. No sign of any device and he felt foolish for supporting Patrick at the risk of Gin thinking less of him.
Meanwhile, Patrick crouched behind the postal box and opened the rear panel. Adam wanted him to succeed in something other than setting off a trap. If he was going to die anyway he’d rather spend his last hours alone with Gin, but there was a slim chance Patrick knew what he was talking about and could help them survive.
“You’re turning into his mini-me.”
Patrick looked both ways before entering the street, probably an old habit. He hurried to them.
“What if he’s right?” Adam asked. Guilt tugged at him as though he’d contributed to her doubt by poking fun at Patrick with her and laughing at her mockery. Still, he’d go with Gin if she insisted upon leaving.
“Unless he brings something besides dead letters and more crap, we’re out of here.”
In his left hand Patrick held a survival knife with a saw back blade and hand guard on the hilt; in his right hand he had a spiked ball and chain on a length of wood; on his face he had a smile for Gin.
“What. The. Hell?” Gin asked as she took the mace.
“It’s a one ball flail, a medieval war mace, probably out of someone’s private collection in Sandalwood. Truthfully not very practical if you aren’t striking at someone who’s using a shield. Maiming someone with this has to be on his bucket list.”
“No, how did you know it was in the postal box?”
The knife blade was at least ten inches, maybe even a foot long. It wasn’t a machete, but it was close.
“Got a whetstone, too—it’s in my pocket. He’ll have stashes like this all over the place. The mailbox is centrally located with easy access and who’s going to look inside?”
“You, obviously.”
“This is far less than I expected. He’s had firefights with the military so there have to be firearms within reach,” Patrick said. “Hoped it was there.”
“A knife and a ball mace,” Gin said. She handed the mace to Adam and it instantly seemed like an unwieldy weapon. And too loud when the links clinked against each other. Adam didn’t want to take any weapon for granted but it seemed like the best idea would be to throw this thing to the highest branch of a tree so Orange would never get the opportunity to use it on someone—least of all someone who’d just tried to use it on him.
Gin was on board the Patrick bandwagon again but Adam wasn’t sure how much time he’d bought. He may have shown he wasn’t completely full of shit, but he was still long on mumbling, extreme theories, odd busy work, and public nudity, and short on a solid plan of action.
“We’d better get out of sight.” He took Adam’s sock and stuffed it into his old pants. He grabbed the pile of clothes. “Come on, I found a place to ambush him. Bring everything.”
Gin shrugged and followed Patrick. She had the bag of socks and her box of shoestrings. Adam slipped his bare right foot into his new shoe and followed with the mace, knife, his box of shoestrings, and the jeans in his size.
Patrick led them to a building on the corner of the intersection. There was no sign discernible above the boarded windows and the doorway was completely open, the door removed altogether. Adam could see a light from inside the building but once closer he noticed it was moonlight from a window along the side wall.
“He trapped the entrance so don’t get gung ho and run past me here,” Patrick said.
He stopped in front and checked down the street, the first time in a half hour he’d shown concern for Agent Orange.
“Look.” He knelt to the pavement and pointed just inside where a thin wire ran parallel to the floor by three or four inches. “Just like the shoe shop so they all must be this way. Trip this and get a torso full of spikes. Same with the exit in the back. Let’s get in here and turn it to our advantage.”
They carefully entered and Patrick hurried ahead. From the aisle he chose you could see the building end-to-end, both entrance and rear exit, although the back of the store was far distant and in the blink of an eye someone could slip into the darkness either side of the doorway.
Adam heard the clothing hit the floor. A solitary button struck the metal of the shelves. It reminded him of jeans in a dryer, a metal snap or button intermittently striking the wall. Funny how the things he’d once hated to hear (Adam, fold the clothes, please) he would die to hear again.
Oh, you’ll die all right. No worries there. Where are you going when you do?
The building had a musty smell
kind of like the shoe store, but not nearly as concentrated; clearly the ventilation had helped. The boards came off two of the windows facing the adjacent street but the lower halves still had panels attached. They remained an unlikely entrance for Agent Orange. Nothing could stop him from kicking through the boards, but why would he? He knew about the door traps and would simply step over them.
“Knife?” Patrick asked and took it from Adam.
The floor was gritty beneath Adam’s feet. After more than two decades of accumulation there were layers of glass, dust, plaster, dirt. He could be walking on crushed bones.
“Laces on the bottom shelf.” Patrick squatted to the floor and took the first box. “Didn’t have time to sweep the other aisles for traps so let’s keep to this one for now. Gives us sightlines to both entrances. I’ll watch the front, so you two have to watch the rear at all times.”
In the available light it seemed to be a grocery store. Not only were the shelving units similar, the top shelf had four cans the size of canned vegetables. In the faint light he caught Gin looking at him. She shrugged. He shrugged. She looked down at the back of Patrick’s head. And shrugged again.
“The fire must have bought us some time,” Patrick said. “If the smoke didn’t draw him to the lodge the smell may have. There’s a good chance he’ll think we doubled back to the lake. That could give us hours. Maybe too much time.”
“Too much time?” Gin asked.
“Tie the laces together as tightly as you can. End to end. Think long rope.” He held up an example in the moonlight. Tied end to end they looked like a mini version of the classic gym rope Adam (thankfully) never had to climb.
“Double knot because it’s crucial these do not come apart,” Patrick said. “Adam, have you seen Full Metal Jacket? No? Of course you haven’t. Match our old socks and put one inside the other. Then drop a small can into each. Imagine swinging the can to bust Orange in the head. Got it?”
Adam cringed because it reminded him of a tale Kevin told him about a fat kid at summer camp, nicknamed Piggy. Several kids went into the woods to sneak a smoke and Piggy ratted them to the counselors, which meant a latrine duty punishment. That night, after lights out, the counselors went to the mess hall to play cards, and we each put a bar of soap in a sock and took turns whacking Piggy in his bunk. It was brutal, man. No bullshit.
“Yeah, yeah, got it.”
Adam selected a new set of socks from the bag. Impossible to tell which color stripes he wound up with but the white glowed ethereally in the low light. He pushed them as far down his ankles as he could but they still shone against his darker sneakers.
Afterwards, his original ankle-cut socks hugged the can like a sheath and left no grip for swinging. Fail for that weapon. He fished Patrick’s socks from his pants, threaded them one inside the other, and dropped a can into them. The fabric didn’t stretch as much as he thought it would, but centrifugal force would stretch it taut if spun a few times. While the cans could pack a wallop on a normal person he couldn’t imagine doing any degree of damage to Agent Orange. The chances of someone uttering the lines “Yeah, took out his ass with a can in my sock! It was lights out, boddy!” were a zillion to one.
Adam could imagine himself David before Agent Orange’s Goliath. He could also imagine far different results. David was armored with the righteousness of God, confident of his success in the face of overwhelming odds. Adam? Not so much. Not at all. Armored only by the shame of impurity, he’d be lucky to get two spins of the sock before Orange dropped him like a bad habit.
“You can put those socks on the shelf there,” Patrick told Adam. “Gin, he’ll need yours.”
“We’re really going to beat him with cans?” Gin asked as she set aside her shoestring box.
“Hell no, you want to die? If we discard our clothes, the recovery team will wonder why. We want to be classified as missing and presumed dead. If they think we’re alive and planning to sneak out they won’t wait for us to try. Let’s not give ourselves something else to worry about. So we tried to make our socks into weapons. Comprende?”
Adam knocked something on the shelf askew; it fell and rolled, a sound much too loud in the confines of the building.
“Careful,” Patrick warned and Adam could have almost lip-synced it. Patrick’s admonishments reminded him of his dad’s. He thought of that face he’d never see again and squeezed his eyes shut against the building storm. He couldn’t break down again now and remind everyone he was the weakest link. Gin almost ditched Patrick when he annoyed her; Adam didn’t want to test how far he could go before he annoyed her to the same extreme.
Something struck him in the neck and his eyes flicked open. Gin’s sock dropped to the floor at his feet. Her second one flew at his face. She seemed to smile, but he couldn’t be certain.
“How did you know to look for tracking devices?” Gin asked. “How do you know so much about who they are and how they run things?”
Silence followed. Adam carefully filled Gin’s socks and placed them on the shelf without a sound.
“Do you plead the Fifth?” Gin asked.
Patrick shuffled across the floor, crunching debris underfoot. He looked out the doorway left and right. Adam waited, not even daring to suck in a breath until the doorway vigil ended with a nod.
“What do I do next?” Adam whispered.
“Hold tight.”
Patrick squatted at the wire for closer inspection. “He built the swing arm with a newel or baluster from a staircase. When the restraining mechanism is released, gravity will do its thing on this one.” He squat-walked backward, releasing shoe string as he went. “One of the spikes is broken and another looks splintered. Used at least once.”
“We’re going to use his traps against him?”
“Newsflash, we’re not making a jump rope. Mmm, sarcasm does make you feel smart, doesn’t it? Anyway, the key is to wound him if we don’t outright kill him with this. I don’t know how the resurrection thing works. Does his body regenerate damaged cells? Is it an active process while he’s alive with wounds healing unnaturally fast? These are things we’ll need to know.”
“But we’re not going to worry about it now, right?” Gin asked. “We’re going to kill him, not incapacitate him.”
“We’ll see when the moment comes.”
“I don’t like that answer, Patrick. I’ll feel a whole lot better when he’s dead.”
“So you can start wondering when he’ll reappear?”
“Aren’t we doing that already?” Gin muttered.
“This string is long enough. It’s on the shelf here, see it?” He pointed to the bottom shelf on Adam’s left. “When he steps through the doorway one of us has to pull it. Wrap it around your fist and tug the fucker. No sissy shit or it won’t work in time. As he steps over the threshold—don’t forget that.” Patrick brought his hands together to mimic a hard tug. “Sit right here and plant your eyes and ears on that doorway. Gin and I will set up the trap in the back.”
“How long?”
The chain clinked on the ball mace. Patrick had picked it up to carry with him.
“Ten minutes. Stay sharp and wait until he steps through the doorway. Don’t get any ideas with the napalm, though.”
They headed to the rear of the building. Adam felt incredibly alone, like this was it—this was when they would sneak out the back.
Gin wouldn’t leave me.
But he couldn’t be certain. Patrick already tried to ditch him once; did he take Gin to the back to try to talk her into it again? Hey, it’s not like we left him without a weapon. He’s got the trap, the napalm, and three socks full of beans.
Only two people wouldn’t have left him behind and they were dead. And he did to them just what he feared Gin and Patrick might do to him.
Adam felt for the string. His fingers found it on the dirty shelf. It triggered a sense memory of his mother’s hands around his, teaching him to tie his shoes. Early home schooling.
And bedtime
, before he was too “cool” and withdrawn.
Do you love me, mommy?
Only for always and forever.
He cried as soundlessly as he could, heart wrung in his chest. Try as he might, he couldn’t keep it together. Grief was an unstoppable force demanding its due.
Fifteen
Hand over her heart, Gin stared at the doorway where a frightened cat just darted over the tripwire into the back lot.
“They’ve done studies on this ecosystem,” Patrick said from the floor. “Feral descendants of domestic animals. Plenty of wild game. Deer, turkey, rabbit, squirrel. We’ll be sick of the latter two by the time we learn to catch the others. Right now I could eat that damned cat. Bastard jumped right out at us.”
Gin nodded in the darkness. She remembered a rock song from a few years ago called “Orange Mustangs,” about the stable horses left behind in Agent Orange’s stomping grounds. They escaped during one of his attacks and it apparently made a great topic for a deep, navel-gazing song.
Patrick tied Gin’s string to the tripwire.
“You and Adam can add to the length. You’ll want more than a yard’s distance from this doorway. Not sure if you can see the trap but it’s a two-piece device, one on each side of the door. Snaps like a pincher. That’s why you two are back here; if one side fails, you still have the other. Better odds.”
They might be able to set off the trap in time but Gin didn’t have a good feeling it would be enough. A boogeyman wouldn’t get ensnared in his own device; it was too easy to think he could.
A safety placebo.
“If we even neutralize him, where are we going to get food? Underwear?”
“Sandalwood. It’s far enough into the Zone to not have any tunnels. The Stalkers probably don’t even bother much with Morgan so whoever put us here doesn’t have to worry about outsider interference. Sandalwood is a different story. It practically vacated overnight and they’ll have some good stuff. Just don’t expect a mall or even a Walmart.”
