Apache Dawn: Book I of the Wildfire Saga

by Marcus Richardson

  She had—and he was sure the mysterious Reginald had been involved—somehow found a way to get a job in his very house, on his personal staff. Right under the nose of his wife and the Secret Service who were always underfoot. And no one was the wiser.

  Jayne Renolds. Her name was seared in his soul. His greatest passion, his greatest disgrace.

  The Vice President’s fingers slowly inched toward the phone to call her into his office. Something stopped him. A blurry thought, a warning from deep inside the increasingly small part of his mind that was still revolted by her touch.

  She was the one who had started this whole mess that now threatened to swallow his family and his career, legacy, and even the country in an atrocious scandal. She had somehow managed, through her shadowy “employer”, to overcome a 27-point deficit at the polls, several costly gaffs by both himself and his running mate at the last minute, and still get them into the White House. He was sure something underhanded had taken place for everything to have worked out the way it did, but there was never even a whiff of it from the media. The Democrats’ victory had been declared a model for future underdogs. ‘Never believe the polls’ became the mantra of the President-elect.

  True to his word, Vice President Barron had voted in favor of Jayne’s employer’s wishes on a few minor issues when certain funding bills were deadlocked in the Senate. He had laughed his way to the podium on those votes. At the time, he had thought that Jayne had attempted to blackmail him over some useless appropriation bills for farm subsidies. The opposition in the House had been stiff—both Democrats and Republicans had balked at signing off on the bills because of some claims of illegal funneling of money to black ops programs involved with the NSA, CIA, or some other alphabet-soup agency. Harold Barron could not have cared less. The bills were harmless as far as he knew and voting the way Jayne told him kept her between his sheets and his secret safe. It was a win-win situation. And his sweet Jayne had kept her word the last few years; she had never told a soul of his dalliance with her, never threatened again and was always ready to wrap her legs around him and purr like a kitten.

  Now he smiled, thinking of her swaying hips as she had walked away from him earlier that morning, adjusting her blouse with a sly smile after his hand went free-range roaming. He had been on a routine arms reduction call with his counterpart in Russia, mostly listening to scientists read numbers over the line.

  He suddenly frowned. She had put him in contact with “Reginald”, the voice on the odd phone calls he had been receiving over the past few years. His head felt thick, like he was in a dense fog. He tried to remember. At first the calls had been rather innocuous. The well-mannered young man on the other end had explained that he represented Jayne’s employers, and he was merely checking up on their “investment”. Over time, it became obvious that her employers really wanted him helping them from within the Oval Office someday. They wanted a pet President.

  Reginald had called every few months, checking up on the newly elected Vice President, asking after his needs or wants, ensuring that Jayne had been keeping him well satisfied, always asking after his wife and children. It had been very cloak-and-dagger in the beginning, but then after the two farm bills had been passed—thanks to the tie breaking vote by the President of the Senate, namely, Harold Barron—the phone calls became more of an annoyance. Reginald had been satisfied and had not asked for any other favors. He just wanted to talk, it seemed, about nothing and then again, everything. Endless, time consuming, random conversations that Harold felt compelled somehow to sit through. Of course, Jayne’s persuasion hadn’t hurt…

  Apparently, as far as the debt owed for getting elected was concerned, Harold was free and clear. He got to “keep” Jayne as a perk of office. And what a perk she was. Harold sighed contentedly. The woman was insatiable.

  That had all changed this past year, though. He frowned again, his mind coming up for air in a fog of images and memories of Jayne. He found it increasingly hard to concentrate on anything else anymore. Reginald constantly floated ideas to him. Numerous “what-if” scenarios were presented to him during their phone conversations, many of which seemed strange at the time, only to be forgotten. Weeks later, when he was doing something completely unrelated, those ideas would flash through his mind unbidden, like shooting stars. It was as if Reginald had planted them in his mind and sat back to wait for the seeds of thought to germinate.

  Lately he had been thinking more and more about those innocent little conversations he had been having with Reginald. What-if, indeed? Something in his core told him to be careful, that he was treading a dangerous line. He just couldn’t put his finger on what was so dangerous.

  Then, finally, the full court press. Jayne had seduced him every single chance she could get him alone during the past month. He had been so physically drained lately that he could hardly think straight. That was when Reginald’s ideas finally started to make sense. That was when Harold started to get scared.

  And now, he realized, he was in checkmate. To renounce Jayne and sever his ties to Reginald would be…unthinkable. Leaving aside the fact that she would expose all their dirty laundry to the press, ruin his career and family, she would take her sweet, sweet body away from him forever.

  He could lose power, he could almost bring himself to believe he could lose his family, for he felt confident they would forgive him in time. But he could not, would not, deprive himself of the joy Jayne brought to his physical being.

  But to agree to Reginald’s plan, to follow through…would…would be…what? Treason was too light a word. He would replace Benedict Arnold as the most infamous American turncoat. The people would see him hang, or they would tear apart D.C. looking for him.

  Although, a little voice nagged within him, if it worked…and if things happened as Reginald predicted…then I would only be a temporary traitor. When the people realized what his swift, courageous actions meant, how he had almost single-handedly saved the country from ruin… He would be hailed as the next George Washington. The people would clamor for him to lead them to a brighter, more prosperous future, he was sure of it. The allure that ambitious future held was almost palpable.

  And wasn’t he grooming himself to be President anyway? That’s what the party bosses had been pumping in his ear the past four years. Just help the President get re-elected and play it safe in the second term, they said. We’ll make you the next President, they said. Trust us, they said.

  He got up and walked over to the side table, under a portrait of a frowning John C. Breckenridge, youngest man ever to be elected to the Vice Presidency. A dour looking 36 year-old, if ever there was one. Harold poured a scotch on the rocks and sipped the single-malt slowly, while he considered the sour-faced 19th century politician.

  President Barron. He rather liked the sound of that. Yes indeed, he liked the sound of that a great deal. Feeling a familiar warmth in the pit of his stomach, he smiled and walked over to the phone on his desk, typed in a certain code and sat on the edge of the desk to wait. He sipped his drink and thought of the future and what promise it held. There would be a lot of suffering at first, but in the end, the future would be…glorious. He had made his decision. He toasted the portrait of frowning Breckenridge.

  “Alea jacta est, brother,” he said, glass held high.

  As he finished his drink, the door to his office opened and Jayne Renolds flowed into the room like a force of nature. “I got your call, sir,” she announced formally with a wry smile. She turned and locked the door behind her, casting a coy glance over her shoulder. His eyes drank in her body. Her eyes locked on his as she removed her glasses and unfastened the bun on the back of her head, letting the sunshine she held back there tumble down to her shoulders and beyond.

  “You look like you’ve come to a decision, Mr. Vice President.”

  Harold grinned at her sultry voice. “Why yes, yes I have.” He cleared his throat and tried to strike a regal pose on the corner of his desk. He adjusted his tie rakishl
y. He was young, athletic, in the best shape of his life. He puffed his chest out, “Does that please you?”

  “Very much so,” she purred as she unbuttoned her tight blouse and revealed her own majestic chest to him. She paused to let him admire and then took two graceful, hip-swaying, heart-racing steps closer. He could smell her familiar perfume and felt that intoxicated feeling thunder over him again. Being around her was such a rush. He couldn’t explain it and didn’t care at the moment why he always felt this way around her. She let herself be swooped up in his arms with a tiny squeal and nibbled his ear.

  As his hands found purchase on her warm, bare skin, she whispered breathlessly, “Now it’s my turn to please you…Mr. President.”

  Vice President of the United States Harold Barron shed the last of his doubts with his pants and gave in to inevitability. Yes, he decided as she wrapped herself around him, he had made the right decision. After all, it was for the good of the country…

  CHAPTER 3

  Salmon Falls, Idaho.

  DENOYAN TECUMSEH PULLED HIS flat gray 1996 Ford 150 4x4 into the driveway of his small ranch house and parked the old truck. It had close to 200,000 miles on it, but was in pretty good shape despite its age. He turned the key and sat patiently as the engine fell silent. Denny got out of the cab and grabbed his worn messenger bag that served as a briefcase of sorts and strolled to his front porch.

  Standing there at his front door, he admired the darkness in which his world had been enveloped with the setting of the sun. It was only the end of September and he could smell the cold wind of winter just around the corner. The warmth of the summer sun had faded fast this year. He savored the sounds of the newborn evening, the insects frantically singing their eternal love songs, the birds settling in for the night in their communal roosts among the lofty pines that lined the mountain town’s streets.

  He took a deep, long, calming breath of cool autumn air, held it, then released and felt calm for the first time that day. He relished the tangy smell of someone in the subdivision burning wood in a fireplace. Denny glanced up the street from his house at the end of the cul-de-sac. No lights glowed in windows. He sighed. Another quiet night. It had been the same every night since the year of the H5N1. The Bird Flu, the Bloody Flu, the Brisbane Flu—it had been given many names, but the biological nightmare that had toppled the 1918 Spanish Flu from the top of the ‘most-killed’ record was known officially as The Great Pandemic.

  He snorted in derision, exhaling a small puff of vapor into the chilly evening air. The Great Pandemic. There had been nothing great about it at all—other than the staggering number of its victims. In his mind, it would always be the Blue Flu, the disease that starved its victims of oxygen.

  Denny looked around the gloomy cul-de-sac. Most everyone in his neighborhood had been affected by the Blue Flu when it swept through town like an avenging angel a decade ago. For such a small, isolated town, Salmon Falls, Idaho had been hit especially hard. Entire families had been wiped out of the hundred-house subdivision. On his street alone, about two-thirds of the houses had lost at least one or two people in those first few terrifying weeks. The survivors lingered on and eventually moved away to start over or join what little family they had left elsewhere in the country.

  Eventually, the banks that had survived the flu-triggered global economic catastrophe had reclaimed most of the neighborhood. But there weren’t enough people willing to buy in a ghost town, so the neighborhood had sat empty, year after year.

  Then the Mormons came.

  An entire ward’s worth of survivors had moved up from Utah over the course of a year and put down roots in Salmon Falls. They bought up a whole block of houses down the first cross-street from Denny’s place. The house next to his had been bought just two years ago by John and Ruth Anderton, an older couple with grown children of their own.

  Denny would have welcomed more people on his street. Nearly every house was still for sale, except his and his neighbor’s. The rest stood empty and neglected, silent witnesses to the wrath of H5N1.

  He sighed and put the key in his front door, chiding himself for thinking of his neighbors solely in terms of their religion. They were quiet, kept to themselves, and were decent people. They genuinely cared for him and even tried to set him up with a few women from their congregation. He smiled and shook his head at the thought of the last date. The poor woman must have been thinking she was sitting across from Geronimo, by the way she reacted to his appearance.

  He flipped on the hall light switch and caught his reflection in the small mirror there. He was handsome enough, he thought. At 43, he still held the strength of youth and was starting to gain the wisdom of age. As far as he was concerned, it was the best of both worlds. He was trim, inheriting a naturally high metabolism from his ancestors. He also had the high cheekbones of his people, glossy-black shoulder-length hair that he kept in a pony-tail to comply with the dress code of Salmon Falls High School. The brown eyes that looked back at him from the mirror were so dark they looked like coal. His skin was a cooper-tan that during the summer drew looks of envy from most Anglos he met. He rubbed the smooth skin of his strong chin and grinned. He had never shaved in his adult life and did not miss having facial hair at all. His colleagues at school mostly wore goatees or beards and were forever scratching at the hair on their neck, or complaining about how their wives nagged them to keep it trimmed.

  He dropped the keys next to his mail into Emily’s little ceramic bowl on the side table in the hall and headed into the living room. He was a creature of habit and after a long day at school, he needed to unwind. He flopped into the Lazyboy recliner that had been Emily’s favorite spot to relax. Denny swore he could smell her soft, sweet fragrance, even after all these years. He looked to the mantel and saw their wedding picture in a silver frame. The dark-skinned Shawnee and the snow-white Anglo with flame-red hair.

  He grinned, thinking about how Grandfather had reacted when he announced his marriage to an Anglo. The old man had nearly had a coronary, carrying on about how Denny, scion of the house of the blessed Tecumseh himself, could not mix his blood with a mere Anglo woman. It would be blasphemy! But then, he had not yet met Emily.

  Denny closed his eyes and smiled, remembering the sunny day when Emily stepped into Grandfather’s house in Oklahoma, on the “Reservation” as the old folks often called it. The Red Eagle was stiffly polite at first, but when he realized that Emily was a Native American historian and part Cherokee herself—granted, a very, very small part—it was like she was already part of the family. When she started a conversation in Red Eagle’s native Shawnee tongue, Denny thought Grandfather would try to marry Emily himself. Grandfather had become fiercely protective of Emily and for the rest of his life, if anyone mentioned anything against Emily, they had to deal with old Red Eagle himself.

  Denny let his eyes wander over to the portrait of his wife on the wall next to the fireplace. They had come together over his ancestry. She had been attracted by his looks and lineage. Outside of her passion for Native American history and culture, they had been complete opposites in everything in life.

  He smiled again, remembering his wife. She had been Lutheran; he was a not-uncommon blend of Christian and Tribal custom. He was just as apt to mumble a prayer to Jesus as he was to listen to the wind or patiently wait for a grove of pines to give him a message from Mishe Moneto, the Great Spirit. She liked to travel to the big cities like Chicago, New York, or Dallas, and dreamed of visiting London and Paris. He, on the other hand, would have liked nothing more than to grab a sleeping bag and head out under the stars and commune by the fire with Kokumthena, his people’s mythical Grandmother.

  Emily had not really liked and indeed, preferred to avoid most things to do with the outdoors. Denny loved every second he could spend hunting, camping, fishing, or hiking. His family, for generations, had grown up deep in the plains of Oklahoma on land they owned but still referred to as The Reservation. The tribe had been cut off from the forests a
nd hills and streams of their past for over a hundred-fifty years. As a hotheaded youth, Denny had sworn to old Red Eagle that one day he would lead his people back to the land of their ancestors, where they belonged, away from the dry, dead flatland of their communal imprisonment.

  Grandfather Red Eagle had smiled and placed his bronzed, wrinkled hand on Denny’s shoulder and smiled. His face had been genially crinkled with mirth and age. Grandfather never spoke at length—as was proper for the clan chief—for he listened much. In that way, Red Eagle had earned the respect of his people. But that day, he had told a very young Denny that he believed him and would ask Mishe Moneto to send him assistance on his quest. He had said the ancestors would be proud.

  Denny shook his head to clear such morose thoughts from his mind. He turned on the TV and reluctantly got out of his chair to get some well-earned dinner. A local news channel came on, the three anchors chatting about the weekend’s upcoming football games. He smiled, thinking of how his students had been bragging about taking on the neighboring team after school on Friday. Two days, they had told him, two days and they would break their best record for a season wide open. He chuckled as he put a sandwich together with cold cuts and grabbed a beer from the fridge. Here it was only 4 weeks into the season and the team was pumped up about going to 3-1 on the year like they were already State Champs.

  “…reports from Idaho State Health officials seem to indicate a higher than normal number of influenza cases this year. That does not bode well for the coming winter, warns the doctor in charge of…” The report floated into the kitchen as he took the first bite of his roast beef and Swiss sandwich.