American Dreams | Book 1 | The Decline

by Parker, Brian

  Rogan’s cell phone buzzed, followed half a second later by Plummer’s. He glanced at his phone in the console and saw that it was an All Hands message. “What’s it say?”

  Plummer read the message aloud. “Priority message. Agents and employees of the CEA. There has been a breach of the Austin CEA offices. Security officers were assaulted and the prisoner who was scheduled to be executed in two days is missing. Former agent, Bodhi Haskins, is a fugitive considered to be armed and dangerous. Shoot on sight is authorized by Director Goodman. All CEA employees are to report immediately to the Austin CEA offices for questioning.”

  Rogan nodded. They’d known it was coming. He pointed at the road ahead. “We’re about ten minutes out from the Patriot Estates. I’ll drop you off and then ditch the car. Taya should have us covered through the completion of the mission before she drops off.”

  Plummer sighed. “I’d hoped to get a little bit of sleep tonight, but I guess not.”

  The rest of the time passed in silence until Rogan dropped Plummer off a block from his house. “See you in a few minutes, man,” the big guy said.

  “Yeah, later.” He pressed the accelerator slowly and drove back out of the neighborhood to drop the car off about a mile from his house. He parked the car alongside the road and rolled the windows down, leaving the vehicle running as he stepped outside and walked quickly back toward the neighborhood. With any luck, somebody would steal the car and their troubles would decrease dramatically.

  By the time he got back to the gated community, he was running very late. He opted to forgo secrecy one last time and sent Taya a text saying he was going to climb the wall into his back yard, which sat along the edge of the neighborhood, and needed the cameras, motion sensors, and alarms on the fence disabled. She replied immediately that she’s already done it as she’d tracked him from the place where he’d ditched the car and that he needed to hurry. They were up against the clock.

  He knew, goddammit. He knew. Goodman had acted about thirty or forty minutes too fast. He hoped Tony was as good as his word and that they’d done a good enough number on him to be convincing. They’d find out in a few minutes.

  Rogan grunted as he dropped the eight feet to the ground into his back yard and jogged toward the sliding door on the back porch. His wife, Trisha, was awake, sitting at the table with a cup of coffee when he came in.

  “You do the thing?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I gotta go shower and head to the office. They’ve already found out and called everybody in.”

  “About you?” she asked in alarm.

  “No. That he’s missing.”

  “Oh. Everything go as planned?”

  He nodded and pointed at the cameras. “My friend is going to turn these back on in a few minutes. We can’t ever talk about this again. Especially not inside this house.”

  “I know, babe,” she said, standing up and crossing over to him. He wrapped his arms around her. “You did the right thing.”

  “I know,” Rogan replied. “But I’m afraid there’s a storm coming. One that’s going to affect all of us.”

  “Well, we’ve got lots of experience with storms. We’ll be okay.”

  He squeezed her harder. “Okay. We need to go upstairs and I need you to get in bed so my friend can turn the cameras back on. It’ll be fine with me in the shower since that’s what I’m supposed to be doing to go into the office.”

  “You’re a good man, Jason Rogan,” she mumbled into his chest.

  “God, I hope I’m not a foolish one, though.”

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-SIX

  “Whaaa?”

  “Shhh,” Cassandra cooed, stroking my cheek gently. It felt weird. I could feel that she was touching me, but everything was numb and her touch felt distant as if my skin was four times as thick as it should be.

  “I had a crazy dream,” I mumbled.

  “A nightmare,” she acknowledged, her face coming into view.

  I smiled. There she was, my girl. The sounds of birds chirping in the early morning was soothing and the cool wind on my skin felt—

  “Shit. It wasn’t a dream, was it?”

  “No, baby. It happened.”

  “I guess that explains why my entire body hurts.”

  I started to sit up, but she pressed me back down. “Why don’t you just keep laying here for now.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Where are we?”

  “Um… About two hundred miles east of Waco. Maybe a little less since it wasn’t a direct route. We’re deep inside the Davy Crockett National Forest. I needed a break to pee, maybe get a little bit of sleep, so when I saw a dirt road, I took it. Led to this nice little clearing.”

  “How’d I… How’d I get out of the car?”

  “You walked, baby. But you were still really out of it and went back to sleep. It’s been, I don’t know, about three hours or so.”

  “Huh. I don’t remember that. I remember Rogan and Chris coming to the agency and breaking me out, but that’s it. I’m not even sure how I got into the car.”

  “Chris helped too?” Cassandra asked. “I didn’t know he had anything to do with it. I thought it was just Taya, and you said it was Rogan?”

  “Ah…” I said, my head lolling to the side. “That makes sense. They needed someone to turn off the cameras and control access to everything. She can do all of that.”

  “Yeah. She controlled cameras all through Austin and along the highway. She even wiped the logs when a retina scanner picked up my biometrics in Waco.”

  “I always said the assignment at CEA was a waste of her talents. She should be waging a cyber war against China or Iran, not searching for people violating curfew on city sensors.”

  “Yeah…” she mumbled.

  “Are you okay? The baby?”

  “Yeah. We’re fine.” Her fingers touched my face lightly again and the detached sensation of feeling her touch as if through a thick layer of rubber returned once more. “They did a number on you.”

  “It hurt. A lot,” I agreed. “But at some point, it sort of all blended together.”

  “Who… Who did it to you?”

  “Mostly Newman, I think.”

  “That piece of shit.”

  I tried to nod, but the back of my head rubbing on the ground hurt too much. “We have any aspirin or anything?”

  “I’ve got the go-bags. Your friend had me grab them. Didn’t we put some pain reliever in there?”

  “Yeah. In my bag.”

  “Okay. I’ll go get it. Here, take a sip of water first.”

  It hurt to swallow, but the fluid was a welcome relief to my dry, cottony mouth. “More,” I pleaded when the bottle was taken away.

  “You need to take it easy. You’ve definitely got a head injury, maybe some internal injuries, I don’t know. You can’t drink too much at one time or you’ll get nauseous and throw up.”

  “Okay.” She was the sports therapy student. She’d know about things like that. “Will do, Doc.”

  She patted me gently on the chest, which, surprisingly didn’t hurt. I guess when somebody’s working you over, they skip the chest because it’s just a waste of time due to the large muscle groups there. I tried to think if I’d ever seen anyone punched repeatedly in the chest during boxing or MMA fights, but couldn’t really remember any. It was mostly abdominal strikes.

  “Here you go,” Cassandra said, kneeling beside me. Geez, I’d let my mind wander off for a minute there.

  I opened my mouth as she pressed two pills between my teeth and put the bottle back to my lips. The cool water helped the pills slide down my swollen throat. It was glorious.

  “Thanks,” I groaned.

  “You’re welcome, babe.”

  I lifted a hand listlessly, gesturing toward my head. “Is there a pillow?”

  “Hold on.”

  I heard her shoes scuff against the ground as she went back to the car. Turning my head slightly, I saw the outline of a red truck. She’d brought
my truck. Smart. It didn’t get as good of gas mileage as her car, but it was sure as hell a lot more capable than the car would have been.

  She returned, placing a rolled up shirt under my head. “Thank you. I think… I think I’m gonna take a little nap.”

  “Okay,” she replied. I felt her lay beside me and curl her body into me. It felt incredibly comforting to have her beside me. It felt like with her by my side, everything would be alright and all of the crazy stuff that had happened over the past few months wouldn’t matter as long as we were together.

  “Promise me that you’ll never leave me,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want you to ever leave me.”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  “I was so scared when your friend told me what happened. I mean, at first, I was shocked, and then I was so focused on getting out of Austin before the CEA decided to come get me too, but when I was just sitting there in the parking lot all day waiting for you… I don’t know what I’d do if I ever lost you.”

  “You’re not going to lose me. Promise.”

  I felt her chin rub against my shoulder. “Get some sleep. I’ll keep an eye out while you’re sleeping.”

  The immense mental and physical strain I’d been under for…however long I’d been a prisoner melted away. I was free, with the woman I loved, the mother of my child. We would be okay, but I needed to let my body heal first.

  I mumbled something incoherent that even I didn’t understand as blissful sleep took me.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Yeah, I think that’s our cue to go,” I mumbled, looking off into the distance.

  We’d been hearing the far-off sounds of cars echoing through the forest for the past several days, since we got here, really. But they seemed to be coming closer, which made me nervous. I wondered if the CEA net was closing in around us. Would it always be this way? Would Cassandra and I always have to keep one eye over our shoulders for the rest of our lives now that we were fugitives?

  The last week had been an exercise in patience, interspersed with hours of boredom as the two of us sat around looking at the maps that Cassandra had picked up at the gas station. Besides those, we had exactly zero reading material to help pass the time. We were too far in the middle of nowhere to get any reception on the radio and both of us were too scared to even power on Cassandra’s phone. We didn’t even have a deck of playing cards, so we were stuck with going over our escape route ad nauseum.

  We’d found a nearby stream to bathe in and the water purification system finally got the opportunity to be put into use. True to the advertising on the packaging, it tasted just like bottled water after it’d gone through the filters. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that it got all of the bacteria out of the water, so Cassandra stuck to drinking the bottled water from the case that I’d put on the floorboard of the truck over a year ago instead of taking the risk with the purified stuff. That wouldn’t last long since we’d been burning through it at a rate of almost four bottles a day.

  We’d agreed that we would leave this morning anyway; the revving of engines as they negotiated roads and trails was more than enough to confirm our decision that we’d risked staying in the Davy Crockett for too long. While the time spent in the forest had allowed me to heal and most of the soreness was now tolerable, it was time to go.

  After much debate, we were going to head east toward Alabama. It was risky to go to my parent’s farm, but we had little choice as far as I was concerned. We certainly couldn’t continue to live in the woods for the next thirty years, not with Cassandra being pregnant and only having about a hundred rounds of ammunition for the pistol. I hadn’t checked into the database in a couple of weeks because I’d been too busy, but the Bureau of Citizen Registration was having a difficult time locating about ninety percent of the people in my parents’ county, including my mom and dad. They were off the grid and didn’t give a shit about the NAR trying to force them to register to buy groceries. What they didn’t produce themselves, they’d trade with the neighbors for. They’d be our best bet for the immediate future.

  “Do we have everything?” Cassandra asked, looking around our makeshift campsite.

  We’d slept in the truck because the mosquitoes and all the other creepy crawlies in the forest, so we’d been pretty good about keeping our supplies inside the vehicle. The toilet paper that Cassandra had taken from the gas station was almost gone, though, and even with severe rationing, we were already beginning to run low on food. The backpacks had only held so much.

  “Yeah… I think so. Let’s do one more sweep around the area and then leave.”

  That final search of the campsite for anything we might have left behind added an extra ten minutes to our timeline and ended up being nearly disastrous.

  “This is more a game trail than a road,” I commented as the truck’s front tires bounced down into another rut in the road.

  “Sorry,” my wife said, glancing over at me with a pained expression. “The clearing was nice, though, right?”

  “Yeah, babe. You did what you needed to do to keep us safe.”

  “How far did you say you went off the road?” Even though we’d discussed the actions of that night and our plans for where we would go in repeatedly, I felt the need to go over it as we drove out of the campsite.

  “It was about two miles. Maybe more. Maybe less. You know, it was like eight a.m. and I was exhausted after driving all night.”

  I nodded and concentrated on the so-called road. The further I drove down the trail, the more impressed with Cassandra’s determination to hide I became. We’d been deep in the woods, I mean, really deep. Most people would have stopped and turned back once the conditions got as bad as they had, but she’d kept going. The distance allowed us to stay in relative safety and let me heal.

  It ended up being just shy of a mile and a half down that little goat trail. Then the dirt gave way to gravel and we took that for another three miles down to the blacktop. I turned the truck’s nose southeast and accelerated, smiling now that we were on our way.

  I slammed on the brakes as we turned the corner. A single Forest Service SUV was parked across both lanes of the road, blocking it. A man emerged from behind the vehicle with an armload of large orange cones. He’d just gotten there and was setting up the roadblock. I slipped on the facemask I kept looped over the rearview mirror and allowed the truck to coast slowly forward to within twenty or so feet. The man set down the three or four cones and placed a hand on his hip.

  As we got closer, I realized it wasn’t a uniformed Park Service Police officer, it was just a guy who worked for the Forest Service, a park ranger. He’d probably been out helping to keep the trails cleared of vegetation a week ago until he’d been forced into guarding this lonely stretch of road. Worse, for him, he wasn’t armed as far as I could tell.

  I rolled down the window when he walked up. “What’s up?” I asked, the mask I wore muffling my voice slightly.

  “We’re out looking for some fugitives who might have passed this way,” the park ranger announced.

  I gestured over at Cassandra. “Just out for a morning drive from our camping site.”

  “Mmm hmm. Which campsite is that, sir?”

  “Just back that way a bit,” I lied.

  “I don’t see your permit in the windshield,” the ranger stated. “I’m gonna need you to show me some ID.”

  “Really? We’re just out for a nice morning drive.”

  “I need to see your Citizen ID. Without it, you’re not going anywhere.”

  “Okay, you got me,” I said holding my hands out above the steering wheel. “We were driving through the Davy Crockett last night and got tired. We slept here without purchasing a campsite.”

  “I need to see your ID, sir.”

  “ID this!” Cassandra said as she moved quickly, causing the truck to rock slightly. I saw the park ranger’s eyes go wide and I turned to see her holding the pistol I’d taken from t
he dead gangbanger. It was extended out, pointing directly at the man standing in my window. Shit! I groaned internally. We were doing this.

  “Back up,” I said. When he didn’t respond because he was completely transfixed by the gun pointed at his face, I yelled again. “Back the fuck up!”

  The ranger took a couple of steps back and I opened my door to step out. He wasn’t a little man, but I still outweighed him by probably eighty pounds. I eyed him as menacingly as I could, but I felt pretty stupid. I needed to work on my intimidating stare down skills.

  Cassandra’s door opened and she came around the truck as the man blubbered incoherently, begging for his life and about his wife and kids. “Shut up,” she ordered with an iron in her voice that I’d never heard before. He didn’t stop, so she stepped forward and put the gun right against his temple. “I said to shut up, asshole.”

  He tried to stop himself. “Are you out here alone?” I asked. He nodded. “That’s pretty fucking stupid.” He nodded again.

  I shoved him, hard, toward his SUV. “Let’s go.” Cassandra flanked him, holding the pistol at his midsection as the three of us walked over to his car. “Do you have any rope?”

  “No,” he replied. “I’ve got some zipties in the back.”

  “Show me,” I ordered. We rounded the back of the tan truck and I said, “Open it.”

  The back area of the SUV was a mess, but there were two five-gallon cans of gasoline inside, along with a chainsaw and a smaller can of gas. “Both of those normal gas, not that two-to-one chainsaw mix?”

  “The two big ones are,” he replied. “We mix the chainsaw fuel in the field.” He pointed to the smaller gas can and a few bottles of 2-cycle engine oil.

  “Okay, good. Take the gas out of your car.” He reached in and grasped the handles. “Is anyone expecting you to check in?”

  He shook his head. “No. We were really good about that a few days ago, but it’s been a week. Most of us thought you guys were long gone by now.”