Mac awoke with his chest heaving, struggling for breath. He quickly covered his mouth to muffle the sound of his own panic so as to not wake the others who slept around him inside the small cabin. A thick layer of sweat covered him, his clothes damp and clinging to his body.
His lungs cried out for oxygen, but even as he opened his mouth wider to accommodate the demand, he was unable to inhale deep enough to do so, and what little oxygen that did enter his lungs caused him to begin coughing uncontrollably. Mac looked down into the palm of his right hand and saw blood.
“Shit.”
Brando had awoken and was looking at Mac, his head cocked slightly to the left. Mac recalled reading many years ago how a group of doctors were using dogs to discover cancerous cells in human patients. The greatly enhanced sense of smell dogs had allowed them to sense sickness in other dogs, and, so the doctors said, in people as well. As Brando’s eyes looked into his own, Mac couldn’t help but believe that on some level, the Doberman was aware of the cancer that was quickly overtaking his body.
“Well, Brando, how about we keep that between ourselves for now, ok?”
Mac laid back and concentrated on his breathing, forcing his lungs to expand and contract slowly and take in as much oxygen as possible as he slowly inhaled through his nose and exhaled out his mouth. The pain from his lungs lessened considerably and his heart slowed to a much more relaxed rhythm.
Satisfied that he wasn’t dying tonight, Mac allowed himself to drift off into much needed sleep.
In a corner of the cabin that allowed him to see outside to where the horses were gathered, Cooper Wyse glanced over at Mac’s form and was glad to see the older man doing better. Clearly something was wrong with Mac’s health, which Brando had sensed almost immediately, but Cooper had long followed the belief that if a man didn’t want to tell you something, it wasn’t any of your business to try and make him. Sometimes a person’s secrets were all they had left in this life. The rancher lowered his hat over his eyes, said a silent prayer for the former Navy SEAL, and let sleep overtake him as well.
XV.
Just before the sun peeked through the tops of the trees from the east, Cooper Wyse was already up and checking on his four remaining horses. Brando was running across the clearing, stopping often to sniff the ground or lift his leg to mark yet another tree. All of the assorted bags that had been packed atop the horses were removed. Cooper knew they would not be going any further on this trip.
Dublin joined Cooper outside, her eyes scanning the tree line where the sun’s light was steadily growing stronger.
“We aren’t taking the horses?”
Cooper shook his head as he looked through each bag and then checked the straps to make sure the contents were secured.
“Imran travels here using an old military transport vehicle. Keeps it parked just on the other side of the trees over there. We’ll all be able to fit inside it, so no sense trying to bring the horses along with us. And they know the way back to the ranch. They’ll be safer there than with us, especially where we’re going.”
Cooper had returned to looking over his horses, and Dublin noted how careful and gentle he was with the large animals. She sensed too how saddened he still was with the horse that had been killed by the drone yesterday.
Brando ran over to greet Dublin, his head nudging against her leg, his eyes clear and alert, clearly enjoying his morning activity.
Reese came outside as well, putting his arm around Dublin and the leaning down to greet the Doberman.
“Hello, Brando!”
Brando’s cropped tail wagged excitedly as he did the same grinning smile he had given Mac yesterday. Dublin laughed aloud and then leaned down to smile back at the dog.
“This is one great dog you have here, Mr. Wyse.”
Cooper looked over at Brando and smiled.
“You keep calling me Mr. Wyse and making me feel like an old man, Dublin. Just call me Coop. And yes, Brando is something special.”
Hearing Coop say his name, Brando jumped over to the rancher and sat with his left shoulder leaning against Cooper’s thigh. While still looking over a horse with one hand, Cooper’s other hand reached down to gently pat Brando’s head.
Bear was the next to come outside. He leaned forward and then backwards, his hands placed against his lower back.
“Got to stretch out every day or I could end up stuck in one position. Bad back – too much football as a kid.”
Reese recalled Bear mentioning his back during their interview in Dominatus two years ago.
Hoping to improve his relationship with Brando, Bear leaned down and motioned for the Doberman to come see him. Brando stared back at the big man for a moment looking disinterested, then relented and walked slowly over to Bear where he then stood staring at the man face to face.
Bear gave the dog a big smile which Brando did not return.
Cooper looked over at the two and shook his head.
“Good god, Bear, you look damn crazy grinning at him like that. No wonder Brando don’t trust you.”
Bear scowled at Cooper’s remark as he stood back up to his full height of more than six and a half feet.
‘Sooner or later, me and that dog are gonna be the best of friends.”
Imran was next to emerge from the cabin. He carried small paper cups of juice on a tray which he offered to the others.
Dublin took one of the cups and drank from it, then lowered the cup and looked at it more closely.
“This is a Dixie Cup! I haven’t seen one of these since I was a teenager!”
Imran smiled broadly, pleased his gift was received so well by another person.
“Yes! We had a shipment of those come from a collector back East, Montreal…that was nearly a year ago. Once things began to be banned, people began to save them up. Garages and warehouses full of stuff like that. Now it is all part of the Black Market here. I traded thousands of those cups to someone in Oregon for a car that I then sold to the godfather himself in Wilfred. He loves old cars. Well, you’ll see all about that. Wilfred is a most amazing place.”
Cooper stood next to Imran and took one of the cups of juice.
“Yeah, hadn’t told you much about Wilfrid, the cars, the streets. They even had a milkman doing morning deliveries like it was Mayberry or something. It’s pretty damn surreal what he’s got going on out there. More than a few people call it insanity, but frankly, I think it’s all kind of nice. A reminder of the way things used to be. Suppose that’s why the godfather went to all the trouble in creating it. Let him live out his days in a world that no longer exists. In that way, not much different than what you had going in Dominatus.”
“What about Dominatus?”
Mac’s voice bellowed from just inside the cabin’s doorway. Despite its volume, he sounded tired. He walked outside to join the others, also taking a cup of juice from Imran’s tray.
Bear tipped his head in Cooper’s direction.
‘Cooper was saying how this outpost, or town or whatever it is that we are heading to, is like Dominatus. Kind of like a place that represents what the world used to be.”
Mac didn’t appear impressed.
“Like Dominatus, huh? Yeah, we’ll see about that.”
Mac looked down at the packs, pointing to one that had been on his horse yesterday.
“Need to get one of those shortwave portables out of there Coop. Want to check in with Juneau, see if they have anything new from the Texas Resistance.”
Cooper Wyse simply nodded and reached into the pack and withdrew one of the handhelds and tossed it to Mac.
“Input the frequency and talk away. Should get a clear signal from here back to Juneau no problem.”
Mac took the device and walked back inside the cabin. Bear watched Mac as he disappeared inside the cabin and then whispered to Reese.
“Mac look ok to you? He seems…more tired.”
Reese glanced in the direction of the cabin’s interior to make sure Mac wasn’t close
enough to hear them.
“Might be the trip over here – the drone attack. It’s easy to forget how old he is. I’ve had to remind myself more than a few times that he’s a seventy-five year old man. As tough as he is, he’s not invincible.”
Bear stood silently for a moment before looking down at Reese.
“Maybe. Still…seems more off than that. Something besides his age.”
Dublin was running across the clearing with Brando. The Doberman appeared delighted to have someone to burn off some morning energy with. Imran began to pick up two of the packs and strap them onto his back, straining just a bit under the weight.
“My vehicle is not so far. A short walk and then we will be off to Wilfrid.”
Imran’s mood seemed perpetually positive and he appeared as happy as Brando to have new company in which to share the day with.
Bear grabbed four of the packs and placed two over each of his shoulders, giving no indication the additional two hundred pounds was even the slightest bother to him. He also carried the portable, laser guided anti drone gun in his right hand.
Dublin made her way back to the group and picked up one of the last three remaining packs. Reese began to strap on two of the final three packs when a voice called out from behind him.
“Now what the hell are you all doing? Trying to keep me from carrying my fair share, is that it?”
Reese thought Mac was joking, but the look on Mac’s face said otherwise. He was upset.
“Bear’s carrying four, you and Imran got two each….guess that leaves me and Dublin to carry just one pack, huh? You putting me in with the women, now? No offense to you, Dublin, but I ain’t used to being coddled, and I don’t like it one bit.”
As Mac grumbled his dissatisfaction, Cooper Wyse leaned over and slowly placed the final pack onto his back, leaving none for Mac to have to carry.
“Now Mac, way I figured it was you would walk ahead of us with your weapon ready to go. You might be the quickest and most accurate shooter here, right? So why not free you up to use those skills if they’re needed.”
Mac shot Cooper a look of disdain, sensing the rancher was coming dangerously close to patronizing him. Bear quickly followed up Cooper’s suggestion with words of support.
“I like that idea, Coop, like it a lot. And I can vouch for Mac’s ability with a gun. Nobody here better than him. What do you think Reese?”
Reese took Bear’s lead.
“Makes sense, Mac, don’t you think? Let us handle the supplies and you focus on keeping us safe, like you’ve always done.”
Dublin interjected as well, though her attempt proved even more adept. She simply changed the subject.
“Did you get a hold of Juneau, Mac?”
Mac looked at Dublin, then back to the other four, and then back to Dublin.
“Yeah, spoke with Franklin personally. They’re not in Juneau though – heading back to Anchorage. Franklin said Anchorage had three drone flyovers late yesterday. A fisherman went missing off of St. Paul. They think a drone might have sunk his boat for target practice. Had another twenty reports of drone sightings from all over the state. Things are tightening up back there real quick. I told him about our own drone attack, of course. How the timing didn’t seem right. How it knew where we would be.”
Bear, born and raised in Texas, asked if Franklin had heard from the Texas Resistance. Mac nodded.
‘Yeah, Franklin got off the short wave with them just a few minutes before talking with me. The New United Nations has about a thousand tanks pushing into Texas now and at least that many drones flying out ahead of those tanks and bombing the hell out of anything that moves. Few thousand of the Resistance are holed up around Midland, while the rest of them are moving out toward El Paso and into Mexico if they have to.”
Cooper’s eyes narrowed at the mention of Mexico.
“Mexico? That shit hole? That place is worse than Canada. Run by the cartels. Just like up here, but instead of Muslim fanatics, it’s the drug lords. They’ll cut off your head just the same though. Why would they be going into Mexico?”
Mac let out a sigh, his shoulders noticeably slumping.
“To hide, I suppose. They are dealing with the New United Nations pushing them back. Either they fall into the water, or they get pushed back into Mexico. They don’t have much choice. Don’t have the weapons to fight back. Not yet. That’s where we come in. We make our way to this Manitoba priest. We get that weapon and we give the Texas Resistance a chance. We give them a chance and every other group that is rising up and fighting back.”
Cooper Wyse finished strapping his pack on and then looked out across the clearing.
“Well then, I guess we better get going.”
Cooper slapped the backside of Licorice as he yelled out the word home. The horse immediately set off across the clearing and into the woods beyond as the other three horses followed close behind.
Dublin appeared nearly as saddened by the horses’ departure as the rancher was.
“Guess there’s no turning back now, huh?”
Mac and Imran took the lead in front of the group as the other three followed closely behind them. Even without a pack, Mac soon struggled to keep his labored breathing quiet and hidden from the others as his mind kept repeating the same words in his head.
Not dying today. Not dying tomorrow. Finish the mission…
It was the very same refrain Mackenzie Walker had told himself nearly thirty five years ago when, bleeding from a gunshot wound just below his right shoulder, he struggled to cross eight miles of arid, rocky terrain to reach a CIA safe house on the outskirts of Borama, a Somali city just inside the Ethiopian border.
Mac had reached that safe house just after nightfall, and within an hour, was being flown from the CIA safe house to a military medical facility aboard an American naval vessel in the Indian Ocean. He lost nearly a third of his blood before the medical team successfully closed the wound. Within three days he was out of bed and awaiting orders to return to Somalia to finish his mission. When those orders did not come, Mac Walker made his way back to Somalia on his own and completed what had been left unfinished – a single bullet into the back of the head of a particularly aggressive Somali warlord who had been funding a growing pirate operation that was crippling the shipping lanes into and out of the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.
Not dying today. Not dying tomorrow. Finish the mission…
Mac had survived a shot to the chest and finished that mission in Somalia all those years ago. He was intent on surviving this damn cancer long enough to finish this current mission against the New United Nations. It was what he did. It was who he was, who he is, and who he would always be.
He wasn’t dying today, but given the pain again searing his lungs with each breath taken as he struggled to keep up with Imran, Mac Walker quietly admitted to himself he was no longer so certain about tomorrow.
XVI.
It took nearly thirty minutes for the group to make their way to Imran’s vehicle parked in another small clearing. Bear looked at the machine and laughed.
“This thing actually runs Imran? Good god man, what a damn rust bucket!”
Imran dropped his backpack and turned to face Bear, his normally friendly face now scowling at the much larger man.
“This rust bucket has been my friend for a long time. She always starts. Always runs. Always gets me to where I need to go. Always. Show some respect.”
Unlike Bear, Mac appeared impressed by Imran’s “friend”.
“This is a CMP isn’t it? Canadian Military Pattern Truck. Guessing it’s World War Two era. Four wheel drive, extra heavy suspension. This thing can get someone there and back for sure. How’d you come by this Imran?”
Grateful for Mac’s approval, Imran smiled broadly as he gently ran his hand along one of the heavily rusted metallic fenders.
“That’s right! A CMP truck! I won it from the godfather himself! Card game! He loves to gamble. All night he plays cards. Smokes and
drinks and plays cards. This time I won – years ago. I have been using her ever since. Carrying goods back and forth. Here, there, and everywhere. She always makes it. She always gets me back to Wilfrid.”
Mac paused along the right door and noted three distinct holes near the bottom.
“You been shot at?”
Imran again smiled while nodding.
“Muslim gang on Highway 37 after picking up goods from the city of Prince Rupert. Drove right through them but they got off some shots. Followed me for almost twenty miles before giving up. They always give up. At least so far.”
Tumultus Page 12
