“She was in that movie, the one with the giant lobsters on the nuclear test site island – and that other flick about the colony on Mars with all those butterfly cocoons, but it wasn’t butterflies that hatched. Remember?”
“No.”
“She was naked half the time. Great actress.”
“Yeah, that no Academy ever honored her is a crime.”
“Hey, she had real presence.”
“Just grab her legs.”
Kent did just that as he and Alphonse loaded her into their SUV. They loaded Nathan soon afterward. Nathan continued to play dead quite convincingly despite the excruciating pain, especially when he was moved. Kent and Alphonse set fire to Kate’s house and Nathan’s car before finally departing.
Some people who’ve survived an apparent death, report experiences of having communicated with departed friends or relatives. Others report encountering an indescribable warm bright light accompanied with the overwhelming feeling of unconditional love. Still others share memories of witnessing their lives flashing before their eyes as they felt themselves slipping away. None of this was occurring with Nathan.
He and Kate had been dumped somewhere in remote wilderness and now Nathan found himself crawling toward her, inching along, not making any real progress at all, but desperate to reach her. All along, selected events of the previous few months of his life were flashing before his eyes, or more accurately, playing on an endless loop in his mind, as he felt himself slipping away. Quick images, in no particular order, snipped together of being abruptly fired, trips to his bank and financial planner’s office, emptying bank accounts, cashing in retirement savings, burying cash at undisclosed locations.
He’d watched how Dr. K2’s U.S. assets were systematically frozen and expected similar treatment if he was ever discovered. Better to keep his assets hidden and out of reach. The truth was, he wasn’t at all sure if he’d ever become a whistleblower either, but he wanted to know the truth for himself and was willing to risk his career. He had been so careful that he never really expected to be found out, let alone that his actions would cost him his life – and Kate’s – but here they were, both discarded and left for dead on the edge of a dank forest.
Time was passing very slowly but it wasn’t much longer before he came nose to nose with a dog, a pair of well-worn hunting boots materializing out of the brush right behind it.
Nathan looked up to see an aging backwoodsman toting a shotgun and dragging a sled with dead game aboard.
“This isn’t a quail, Rupert.” the backwoodsman told his dog, his voice matching his demeanor. Flat.
The dog sat, regarding his owner, tail wagging furiously. The backwoodsman disappeared, reappearing a moment later.
“The woman’s dead. You don’t look so good yourself.”
Nathan tried, but he couldn’t respond. The backwoodsman calmly extracted a pouch of tobacco and rolled a cigarette as he stood over him, taking his time. He finally lit it, enjoying a puff before bending to inspect Nathan’s injuries. He offered Nathan a drag. Nathan turned his head away, steadfastly refusing.
“A nonsmoker. I dig… kids don’t use that terminology anymore, do they? ‘Dig’. What is it now, ‘hip’, ‘rad’? I understand ‘swag’ is becoming popular as an all-purpose expression of agreement or endorsement. The youngsters think it’s a recent invention of their generation. Course, they’re wrong. Swag was first used to convey that meaning in ‘The Tragedy of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt’ by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, in 1640. ‘Hansom swag fellowes and fitt for fowle play’. Needs to be understood in context but I’ll save the rest because I can see you’re not in the right frame of mind – swag...”
Nathan indeed was frowning, wondering why the old guy was rambling on instead of helping. He had no way of knowing it yet, but the old man was decidedly going to make a very serious attempt to save his life. Apart from being very well read, the old guy was a Viet Nam vet, two tours, or more accurately, one and a half tours because he deserted. He was a battlefield medic and before P.T.S.D. or bipolar existed in the English lexicon – he snapped and walked away from a M.A.S.H. unit, wandering throughout Southeast Asia for years before returning to the United States via Canada under an assumed identity. He’d dropped out of society almost completely ever since and had lived in the woods on his own, rarely communicating with humans. But he wasn’t done with Nathan just yet…
“Me, I started smoking way back, shortly after doctors stopped advising patients about the benefits of tobacco, how it relieved stress, helped cure insomnia, things like that. They even recommended brands. I opted for Chesterfields unfiltered, made the most sense for me and my particular set of ailments at the time. It wasn’t until years later that I found out the truth about big tobacco, how they were lacing their products with all types of noxious chemicals. Disgraceful. This here though, this isn’t store-bought. I grow it and cure it myself. Purest tobacco in the county, and that’s a fact. Now, you have three holes in your chest and you’re not dead yet because the bullets miraculously didn’t obliterate any vital organ or sever a major artery. On the other hand, I can see that your face is drained of pigment, which means you’ve lost a lot of blood. You’ll also certainly go into shock soon if you haven’t already, which means you might be gone before I finish my next thought. Which is this. I’d like to request, if you wouldn’t mind, that you sample my pure, chemical-free tobacco, not because it’s absolutely delicious, but rather because I’m interested about whether or not both of your lungs are collapsed. I’m not a young man anymore, you see, and it would be an unnecessary burden on my joints to drag you back to the cabin only to have to bury you in the yard. I’d much rather bury you here.”
The backwoodsman offered Nathan the cigarette again. Nathan eagerly took a drag this time, coming up hacking and spitting – and looking for more.
“Damn you.” the backwoodsman muttered under his breath, reluctantly extinguishing his cigarette before taking Nathan by the collar and dragging him toward his sled.
A homemade, computer-generated advertisement, which read: Crop Dusters For Rent, was being stapled onto a corkboard. Olive Beacon, 17, was doing the stapling and she was in a smoke-filled restaurant/bar with pool tables. Yes, smoke-filled places like this still exist in sections of rural America.
Behind her, a band of musicians strummed instruments as people crowded a tiny dance floor. To her left, hidden in the shadows of an alcove, a man – mysterious and ghost-like – drank alone at a table, a duffel bag by his feet.
At the front entrance, a trio of farmhand tough guys entered, covered in dust, pool cues in hand. The leader, Brady, noticed Olive and nudged his buddies. Brady lit a cigarette as he and his friends snaked through the crowd, approaching, eventually encircling her.
“Hey, baby.” Brady offered through nicotine-stained teeth.
Olive, wide-eyed and frightened all of a sudden, attempted to leave but Brady stepped in her way.
“Whoa, where’re you going, girl? You haven’t even said hello.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Easy. Just want to let you know how good you’re looking these days. All grown up and such.”
Brady slowly backed her up against a cigarette machine as he said that.
“Get out of my way.” Olive responded, her voice cracking with anxiety, but doing her best to put up a brave front.
“Where’s my money?” Brady hissed.
“I don’t owe you anything.”
“Okay, fair enough, not you, that deadbeat mother of yours.”
“She doesn’t owe you anything either.”
“I fixed her fence.”
“Yeah, after you broke it.”
“I’m gonna collect what’s mine, baby. If not from your old lady, then from you.”
“Got a nice fleece blanket in the back of my truck, Brady. Maybe we can get her to cancel some of that debt tonight.” offered one of Brady’s friends.
Brady grinned. What a fabulous idea. “Did you hear that, b
aby? Fleece.”
“Let go of me!”
The man in the alcove had, by now, risen to his feet a few moments earlier, calmly stepping into the light, approaching the cigarette machine, coins jingling in his hand. It was Dr. Nathan Cribbs. Three years older. Eyebrows freshly groomed.
The former Viet Nam medic turned backwoodsman had managed to save his life after all. It wasn’t easy, nor did it ever seem very likely given Nathan’s deteriorated condition, even though the old man’s cabin was reasonably well equipped and stocked with many of the requisite and essential medicines and surgical gadgetry – items he hoarded, first and foremost for himself, but also medicaments and devices he periodically used to save injured wildlife, including several birds of prey, one fox, two bear cubs and three pet dogs over the years.
By the time Nathan reached the cabin – moments before he flatlined – he was ghostly-ashen, sweating profusely, had cold clammy skin, grossly enlarged pupils and his breathing was fast and shallow. He’d finally flatlined due to shock and blood loss and the old man scrambled to resuscitate him using a homemade defibrillator powered by a car battery. The old man, in fact, performed one other task pretty much simultaneously. He readied the equipment necessary for drawing his own blood, extracted just a little beyond the maximum amount without blacking out himself, and delivered it into Nathan’s forearm. His blood type was O negative, the universal donor type, so his efforts worked. Temporarily.
The backwoodsman then carefully examined Nathan’s injuries, finding two exit wounds. A pair of the bullets had probably nicked rib bone on entry, which would explain their altered trajectory given that both bullets exited through fleshy parts of Nathan’s back under his shoulder blade. The third bullet smashed through a frontal rib bone, lodging into another rib in the rear and remained there, partially protruding from his body.
Apart from the problem of having to solve any internal bleeding issues, the third bullet would also prove to be a problem because it needed to be removed. The old man would not be able to attempt anything further however, until Nathan became more stable. For the time being, he cauterized five entry and exit wounds without benefit of any antiseptic or painkiller. He did all of this, of course, while endlessly blathering on about the contents of historical books and their venerable authors.
As the days merged into weeks and then into months, Nathan’s condition alternated between bad and worse due to infection issues. It took well over a year for things to finally clear up and then another year and a half of rehab to recover back to a sense of normalcy. By then, the old man had prattled on, in detail, about so many subjects that Nathan could easily have earned honorary doctorates in literature, history and a host of social sciences.
“Excuse me.” Nathan said as he tapped Brady on the shoulder.
Brady spun, irritated, sizing Nathan up. Truth was, Nathan wasn’t exactly an imposing figure – five foot ten and a lackadaisical one hundred and seventy-five pounds. Brady and his bulky six-foot-four-inch frame didn’t find him intimidating at all.
“Get lost, gramps.”
“Come on, guy, I’m having a nicotine fit over here.”
“I said move it along, old man.”
Brady shoved Nathan as he said that but Nathan and his fifty-four-year-old body absorbed it, staying put. Brady’s friends crowded around in a show of strength.
Unlike the backwoodsman who’d saved his life, Nathan had never served in the military, nor had he ever had any formal training in any type of combat whatsoever – he was a science nerd, plain and simple – but he was nevertheless a dangerous hand-to-hand fighter. Completely self-taught since childhood, he was unorthodox but accomplished, and he taught himself to become so lethal for the most bizarre of reasons.
“Fine. I’ll wait.” Nathan said as he plucked the cigarette from Brady’s mouth and started smoking it.
The farm toughs eyed each other in disbelief, aggressive juices jumping, but flight instincts stirring as well. Was Nathan deranged? Did he have a gun? Brady took action. He had to – people were watching. He lunged at Nathan but his pool cue found air. Nathan hit him only once – with blinding speed, dropping him with a thud as if Brady was an inanimate sack of cement.
One of Brady’s friends attacked almost simultaneously. Nathan hit him only once as well. As advertised, there was nothing orthodox-smooth about the way he fought, in fact there really was a type of awkwardness to it, but it was cobra-quick and very effective. And as Brady and his friend writhed in agony on the begrimed floor, Nathan eyed the third tough guy – who’d just witnessed his future up close and decided to bolt for the exit.
It all happened so fast, but some people stopped to gawk, including a drunken Kent and his size 9 sneakers. Kent stumbled backwards, squinting furiously in disbelief as he recognized Nathan. How could this be? Nathan was dead, Kent had shot him, dumped his body… Nathan didn’t know Kent was there.
“Thanks.” Olive said, something crackling in her chest. Suppressed fear releasing.
Nathan nodded, his nod serving as a silent you’re welcome before he turned his back on her and began plugging quarters into the cigarette machine. Behind him, Brady and his friend found their feet and scrambled out. Olive continued to loiter.
“Look, can I buy you a drink or something? I mean, I’m not old enough to order but I’ll pay for it.”
“Go home.” Nathan responded, never bothering to look at her.
Olive backed off, fading into the background as Laura, a neighborhood party girl, approached. Nathan slammed the cigarette machine with an open palm.
“There’s no winning with this thing.” Nathan announced, assessing her.
“It’s empty. Just there for show.”
“Management should put up some sort of sign then. Warn customers.”
“It’s illegal to dispense cigarettes from machines these days.” Laura responded, schooling him further. “A federal law that’s been around, like, for years now. The fact you don’t know that tells me you’re either a foreigner or you just got released from a long stint in jail. And since you’re speaking pretty good American English…”
“I’m not up on tobacco laws. I just took up smoking. Not that long ago.”
“While you were in jail?”
“I haven’t been in prison.”
She scrutinized him for a moment, trying to gauge him, staring as deeply into his eyes as he generally ever allowed. Somewhere just past the eyelashes. It’s hard to say whether she believed him or not, but it didn’t matter. She liked what she saw.
“Okay. Good to know… That was very impressive, how you handled those boys.”
“I got lucky. You dance?”
“Depends. Are you trying to get lucky twice in a row?”
“Would that be pushing it?”
“Let’s find out.”
She spun away. Nathan took Olive’s advertisement, folding it into his pocket before following Laura onto the dance floor.
Olive pulled up to a farmhouse in her faded shamrock green ‘70s-era Gremlin, covered in blanched bumper stickers. Dozens of them. Things like Save The Whales, Yes We Can, Fur Is Murder, and War Is Not The Answer.
She exited, crossing for a barn where, surprisingly, there was an elaborate theatrical stage along with racks of western-style costumes and props. There was also a mannequin wearing a fake dynamite belt.
She found a broom and started sweeping the stage as – BAM! – a gunshot rang out. She spun, wide-eyed, expecting Brady, but found her mother instead. Waltona Beacon, a smoking pistol in her hand.
“Mom! Are you serious, you nearly gave me a heart attack!”
“What time is curfew?”
“Ten minutes late. I was out stapling flyers aroun…” Olive’s voice trailed off as she noticed that one of her Gremlin’s tires was flat.
“Did you just shoot out my tire?”
BAM! Waltona responded by shooting out a taillight this time.
“Mom!”
“You opted out of college,
fine. But either you follow household rules and start helping out around here, or you go out and find a job. I’m not going to watch you turn into a bum.”
“I opted out of agricultural college. You won’t support me in pursuing what I really want.”
“Acting is no career, Olive. You’re not a child anymore. Quit behaving like one.”
“It’s what I want to do with my life. But even if I did go to agricultural college, the last thing I’d do is run a farm like this one. Those fields are sterile, Mom. There are no bugs, no birds, it’s not natural.”
“I do what’s necessary to survive.”
“You’re growing Frankenstein crops out there.”
Waltona slapped her, hard, shocking Olive, catching her completely off guard. It was the first time Waltona had ever struck her daughter. Olive meant exactly what she said. Waltona, however, interpreted her words differently. Perhaps it was also Olive’s tone, but the exchange represented a monumental tipping point for Waltona.
Waltona married young. Raised by strict but loving parents, she retained many of their conservative values as she aged. By the time she inherited her family’s farm, her husband of eleven years had slowly drifted away from his own conservative roots, metamorphosing into a radical socialist in Waltona’s eyes, which rankled her considerably and fundamentally strained the relationship. The fact that she felt she needed to assume the mantle as her daughter’s sole disciplinarian the entire time Olive was growing up, only exacerbated Waltona’s level of resentment toward him. It was her who always had to play bad cop. He always played good cop, or more often than not, no cop at all. The man irrevocably spoiled his daughter. And much to Waltona’s displeasure, Olive had adopted his worldview.
Olive’s father had been deceased for two years now, the victim of a compromised immune system during an unfortunate series of events, and even though he died lacking a life insurance policy, the family was no longer facing bankruptcy because the farm, which he insisted be run strictly as an organic operation, turned profitable again. Olive blamed her mother for his death. That is how Waltona interpreted Olive’s words. That is why she slapped her.
Wicked Seeds Page 2
