That much had been technically true. He could have put in eight more years. He could have walked away with a pension. But eight more years of forcing his shipmates to go through several times more Full Dress Alpha inspections than any other unit, just so some Admiral or another could have his picture taken with Jake wearing that goddamned medal around his neck; of having officers make a great show of saluting him every day in public, only to hate him for it in private; of putting up with the endless real bullshit that comes with life in the military, coupled with the endless fake bullshit of being a poster-child, would have driven him right out of his fucking mind. And for what?
A twenty year pension for an E-6 worked out to roughly eighteen grand a year - before taxes. By comparison, a member of Congress, after only four years of risking their liver at cocktail parties, took home forty-five grand a year. So for just eight more years of risking his life for the American taxpayer, Jake could have taken home a pension below the poverty rate, and less than half that of the assholes who’d voted to give him that goddamned medal. Support the troops, my ball sack, he thought.
Rachel (Dani, he reminded himself) had remarked on The Shrine the first time he’d brought her to his home, just as everyone did. He’d given his practiced “wrong place at the wrong time,” by way of explanation, and then, as usual, had added, “And no, I’d rather not talk about it.” She’d taken him at his word and never mentioned it again. He liked her for that - liked her for quite a few things - but that was one of the big ones. She accepted those parts of him he didn’t want to talk about, and in return, he did her the same courtesy.
Most women he’d known wouldn’t leave it alone - wouldn’t leave anything he didn’t want to talk about alone - would pick and prod and wheedle and cajole, until he’d be forced to come up with some line of bullshit that would satisfy. Why couldn’t they just let him be who he was, without all the explanations? Might as well ask why water was wet.
He sat and drank more coffee, groaning as he glanced at the wall clock and saw it was three-thirty in the morning. What the Hell was he doing up? Oh yeah. The nightmare.
2
The blood dripping down over his arm . . .
The knife jammed into the guy’s crotch . . .
The screaming . . .
The ground trembling beneath him . . .
No . . . Wait . . . What?
His eyes reopened and he found himself right where he should be: in his recliner, in his house, in Las Vegas. Not in Iraq. Not back in that nightmare in the desert.
He took a reassuring sip of coffee and surveyed his surroundings. Plates rattled in the cupboard, the ground trembled, the house shook. And then it stopped.
An earthquake. There had just been an earthquake. In Vegas? Of course in Vegas, you idiot. That’s where you are. That’s where you live.
He set his coffee down on the table at his right arm and levered himself out of the chair. Everything was as it should be. But there had been an earthquake, hadn’t there? He couldn’t have dreamed it. Best to be sure. He stepped over to the stereo and turned on the radio.
“...I felt the earth move that time!” the female DJ said. “And no, Sparky, it wasn’t you.” Canned “funny” music played. He hated this morning show. A trio of DJ’s, a woman and two men - all of them morons.
“That was, what? A four-point-oh, at least,” one of the men opined.
“Bet that woke up a few drunks,” the other man threw in his two cents. More “funny” music played. Jake turned the stereo off.
3
Cascadia Subduction Zone
Beneath the West Coast between Juneau and Eureka, there are a number of massive fault zones, where the coastal plates meet and slide beneath the larger North American Plate, on which most of the United States sits. The Queen Charlotte Transform fault extends southward past the Alaskan Panhandle to the Olympic Peninsula. There, the ancient Explorer Plate separates it from the Juan de Fuca Plate, that extends from the middle of Vancouver Island down to the Blanco Fracture Zone, off Southern Oregon, where it meets the Gorda Plate, which stretches along the coast of California halfway between the Oregon border and San Francisco Bay. Those several plates create the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which has been waiting since the year 1700, building pressure, biding its time.
It didn’t have to wait much longer.
4
Volcano Observatory
Yellowstone National Park
“Here goes another one,” Maggie reported, as the horizontal zigzag worked its way along the graph. Five in the last hour, she thought, her mind going through the statistics she’d studied over and over and over again since her parents took her to Yellowstone for the first time. Twelve years ago, the random fact popped into her head and was quickly dismissed. Didn’t this happen the last time Denali went? That was Nineteen Seventy-five? She’d have to check her notes, but she already knew she was close enough to being right.
The Yellowstone Caldera, site of the largest, most carefully monitored volcanic system in the world, generally averaged up to as many as forty earthquakes a week. It was the most seismically active region of North America, outside of the San Andreas, so multiple tremors were to be expected. But five in an hour? That seemed a bit high, making this an earthquake swarm; a precursor to eruption. Don’t get carried away, Maggie.
Swarms happened all the time. Well, maybe not all the time, but often enough that this most likely meant nothing more than that the Monster Under the Ground was taking a rather extended deep breath. That was what Doctor Golatta had said he told his nephew Georgie to “mess with the little bugger’s mind” when the poor kid came to visit the park.
Monster Under the Ground . . .
An apt enough description, to be sure, regardless of the fact that Professor Rick Galotta was a cruel jerk for inflicting it on a child. The ground around the park swelled and subsided quite often; if, that is, your definition of often could be measured in geologic time.
“MMS 1.3,” she told him, referring to the Moment Magnitude Scale, which replaced the more familiar Richter Scale in the 1970's. The differences between the two were meaningless to everyone but geologists and seismologists and volcanologists, but, essentially, the MMS was developed because the Richter Scale had difficulty accurately estimating the strength of the really big quakes.
Not that what they were experiencing could be considered big, even under the old system, but Maggie had witnessed the professorial smack down of far too many students who inaccurately referred to the Richter. She wasn’t about to make the same mistake.
Dr. Golatta nodded, flipping through a stack of reports, looking for something he’d apparently decided she didn’t need to know, just now. “Still decreasing since the 3.1. Good.” He pulled one page out of the stack and slapped the rest down onto the desk in which he’d been rummaging for the last twenty minutes. “Epicenter?”
“Still Norris,” she replied, referring to the Norris Geyser basin, a bit less than twenty miles to the north of Old Faithful.
They didn’t actually feel any of the tremors, although she thought she’d seen a ripple in her tea cup when the 3.1 happened. She’d passed it off to being so early in the morning. It was just now five o’clock, Mountain Standard Time. Her parents in Seattle, one hour earlier, would be sound asleep, her father sawing logs like a gang of lumberjacks. She owed them a call, but not this early.
Staying up all night (a right of passage to most college-aged people of her acquaintance) had never appealed to her. But it made sense that she’d gotten stuck with the night shift right away. She was the new kid, fresh from the Volcanology Department at the University of Utah, where the actual headquarters of the Observatory resided, and so she had to pay her dues.
Maggie wondered a bit about how awake she felt. She should be groggy, or at least a little fatigued, and she kept expecting a yawn that never came. This was far too exciting.
5
Las Vegas, Nevada
Showered, teeth brushed, and a second
cup of coffee ingested, Jake felt more or less human. The phone rang. He glanced at the clock. Four-thirty? Who the Hell would call at four-thirty? And then he knew the answer: Mom.
“Hello, Mother,” he said, confirming her name via the wonder of Caller ID.
“Hey Kiddo,” she began, ignoring the fact that Jake was thirty-nine years old. “Dinner tonight?”
“That’s the plan,” he replied. “Need me to bring anything?”
“Nope. Six-ish?”
“Works for me.”
“See you then,” she replied, and ended the call. Thus, Mom: straight to the point, pass the information, hang up. She said hello, asked a question, got an answer, confirmed a detail, and done; nothing extra, nothing non-essential.
The phone rang again. Again, Caller ID said: Mom.
“Forget something?” He asked.
“Uh, yeah. Sort of.” She was hedging. That wasn’t normal, at all.
“Spill,” he demanded. “What’s up?”
“Davis called last night.” Davis Goddard was her sometime attorney and sometime Friend with Benefits.
“And?”
She sighed, then took a deep breath. “Freddy’s been released.” Freddy, aka, Freddy Perdue, aka, that Rat Fuck Son of a Bitch who had beaten and all-but raped his mother, had also been her one-time husband. The Air Force stuck him in a loony bin, up the Western mountains near Pahrump, supposedly for a minimum of twenty years.
“When?”
“Three weeks ago.”
“And Davis just told you about it last night?”
“He just found out about it yesterday.”
“I’ll have somebody’s balls for this,” Jake growled. The Rat Fuck wasn’t supposed to get out for at least another five years.
“No, Jake. You won’t,” she said, in her best don’t give me any shit voice. “He’s been out for three full weeks, and nobody has seen hide nor hair of him since.”
“They just let him out?” Jake demanded. He was out of the recliner and pacing - stalking - through his livingroom. “No parole, no probation, no whatever it is you do to recently-released nut cases?”
She sighed. “He was supposed to check in with his out-patient therapist, but he never showed up. I called Bert at the Sheriff’s office and they issued a BOLO. Believe me, if they find him, it won’t be pretty.”
“And if they don’t?”
“I have my gun.” And with that, she hung up. Conversation over. Period.
But it wasn’t over. Not by a long shot. Not for Jake. He wanted that shit-stain; wanted him bad; wanted him dead.
The blood lust swelled inside him - still deep down, not rising, not ready to burst into some random act of violence, but there. Definitely there.
This was good. Bad, but good. When it came right down to it, that’s what bothered him about what happened in the desert. It wasn’t what he’d done. That had been simple, clear-cut, utterly unambiguous. Kill or die. Save lives (including his own) or lose it all. He could deal with it, had made peace with it. How he’d felt while he did it, however . . .
He dropped back onto the recliner and rubbed his face with both hands. They trembled, just a bit - not much, not enough to catch with his eye, but he felt it there, just below the surface, and just above that thing inside him.
Somewhere deep within himself lay a kernel of inhumanity, a black darkness, an inner-demon who enjoyed the killing. He closed his eyes and the memories flooded in.
6
Farm House
Caliente, Nevada
Freddy Perdue remembered the day he got arrested; idly mulling it over in his head as he labored with the shovel in the rock hard desert earth. He remembered the trial (more of a hearing - more of a kangaroo court, really) when he was sentenced to twenty years commitment to the Southern Nevada Institute for the Criminally Insane.
Of course they didn’t really call it that. Its official name was the Gephardt Center, named after some fucking rich bastard whose mother had been convicted of murdering two neighbor children she’d become convinced were in reality aliens sent to collect her for experimentation. Or so the rumor went. Freddy wasn’t sure how much stock to put in such obvious cliched bullshit, especially given the Center’s proximity to the famed Area 51, but then again, it mattered not one whit, because he’d been sent there to be “treated” for his supposed paranoid delusions and violent tendencies.
That’s what the shrinks had called it: tendencies. He tended to get pissed off when stupid people got in his way. He tended to get angry when obviously inferior people were put in charge over him. And he tended to act on that anger in violent ways.
Plus, he really liked to fuck when he was angry.
Since he was unreservedly, incontrovertibly, and intractably heterosexual , this meant he beat the shit out of the men who pissed him off, and fucked the shit out of the women. He smiled at that thought, and pondered the twin treats he had locked up inside the farmhouse.
He also pondered the depth of the hole he’d been digging. Fuck! That dirt was like concrete. Sweat poured off of his fleshy face, plastering his mostly grey hair to his skull - in spite of the desert-dry night air - and his breath was coming in gasps.
He really needed to get back in shape. All those years inside, all that crap food, all those hours of drug-induced stupor doing nothing in his cell or the Common Room, had left him weak and flabby. All that time spent sitting on his ass listening to one asshole therapist after another mouthing the same platitudes about reason and measured responses and control.
And the food? Three squares a day of bland dishes, one indistinguishable from the next, all of them tasting like salty cardboard, or creamy cardboard, or cardboard-tasting cardboard, had left his palate neutered.
That was a good word: neutered The drugs had taken his libido just as completely as if they had lobotomized the sex-center of his brain. It left him hollow. It left him hungry.
He judged the hole to be deep enough. Whether it was or not hardly mattered. The house was far from the road, and the farm - with its foul stench of the pigs the farmer kept - was a full three hundred acres of mostly scrub and mesquite and tumbleweeds. Why the fuck the old bastard had first bought and then kept so much worthless land was a mystery to Freddy, but that hardly mattered, either. The old fuck wouldn’t be doing anything with it ever again.
He shoved the tablecloth-wrapped body with the flat of his boot and the dead farmer rolled into the hole with a thud. Freddy paused a moment, wiping his face with a ragged old handkerchief one of the asshole’s two daughters had given him.
Their faces were nothing to write home about, but their bodies were firm and fine and fully equipped with all the necessary parts. And they were waiting for him, there, in the house. And he was hungry.
Smiling, he began shoveling the dirt back into the hole.
7
Okinawa, Japan
Jake had been hungover - as usual. That was the first thing. In fact, he had still been shitfaced, after a final night on Okinawa.
He’d been on the first full thirty-day leave he’d ever taken, and he’d done it alone. Active duty military could fly space-available for free anywhere in the world - anywhere, that was, that Military Airlift Command flew to, which was pretty much everywhere. Might need to take a circuitous route to do it, but he’d get there in the end. Okinawa had been his first stop.
From there, he’d taken a short commercial flight to Tokyo. He hadn’t liked it much (too crowded and way too expensive) and so he’d cut short his visit and returned to the US Air Force Base on Okinawa. The next leg was supposed to take him to Rota, Spain, and it would have - with a slight (in typical military understatement) detour through Bagdad.
There had been a female Marine, that last night on Okinawa, with one sweet honey of a backside. He’d been just about ready to gain access to her Holiest of Holies, and they were just about to saunter off to do so, when a squad of her fellow Jarheads wandered up to them. They’d taken offence at his being a Puddle Pirate
about to spoil a God Blessed Marine, and so, discretion being the better part of not getting his ass kicked, he’d gone on his way: straight back to the bar. Sixteen hours later, he’d been passed out cold on a MAC Flight when the plane crashed, right smack dab in the middle of an Iraqi war zone.
There had been nine survivors, including Jake. He’d walked away pretty much unscathed, due, no doubt, to the fact that he’d been unconscious, and, therefore, utterly limp when the plane hit the ground. The other eight survivors (all Marines) had not faired as well. But at least they’d been alive.
Because he had not been hurt, beyond a nasty bruise he’d sustained on his shoulder when he hit the ground, the task of caring for the other survivors had fallen to him. His mother (the trauma nurse) spent most of his childhood pounding advanced first aid into his skull, so he’d known what to do.
Since he also wasn’t a complete idiot, once he’d discovered they were in the middle of a war zone, at night, miles from who the fuck knew where, he also knew that sitting around the burning wreckage of a plane would be a monumentally bad idea. So he’d coaxed and carried half of the other survivors to the relative shelter of a cluster of bombed-out buildings about a quarter mile away.
It had been dark, away from the fires of the burning plane, and it had been slow going - both because only four of the eight had been marginally ambulatory, and because the further he got from the fire, the less he could see. All but the four who couldn’t walk had been tucked away when the first bad guys showed up.
He’d heard their yelled gibberish before he saw them.
He’d always had what he considered to be a delightful sense and appreciation of the absurd, and so it struck him as perfectly ridiculous that the Insurgents had been yelling at the four non-ambulatory survivors in Arabic, or Farsi, or whatever fucking language had been coming out their pie holes when he returned to the crash site.
There were two of them, both facing away from Jake when he approached and hid behind a piece of wreckage. One held an AK-47. The other held a sword - an actual sword. What was this, the Middle Fucking Ages? Both had been waving their weapons around, as if celebrating some great event. Neither had seen him grab the two-foot long jagged hunk of what had probably been an hydraulic arm from one of the ailerons on one of the wings. It had felt substantial. And it had felt so goddamned good when he’d used it to cave in the skull of the one with the AK.
Pressure (Book 1): Fall Page 3
