VELOCITY

by Jude Hardin

  “Nobody ever comes by here,” the old man said. “And that’s the way I like it.”

  “I see. I’m going to leave you one of our walkie-talkies. If you happen to see a man about six feet tall with sandy blond hair and beard, give us a call.”

  “I’ll sure do it.”

  Santa closed the door and several sets of footsteps clomped off the porch. I waited a few minutes and then wriggled out from beneath the bed.

  “You did good,” I said. “Thank you.”

  He sat at the table, reached into his pocket and pulled out a zippered plastic bag with an ounce or so of marijuana in it and a pack of rolling papers.

  “Mind telling me what this is all about?” he said.

  I walked to the table and sat in the chair across from him. I told him what this was all about while he pinched some of the weed from the bag and expertly constructed a joint the size of a roll of dimes. He lit the fatty, took two tokes and then passed it my way.

  I took a hit.

  It would have been rude not to.

  It was the first time in three years I’d drawn smoke of any kind into my lungs. It was sweet and smooth and a happy calm washed over me almost immediately.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I needed that.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Nicholas Colt.”

  “Dempsey Waters. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Likewise. Look, I need to find a road and a ride and get out of here.”

  “I can point you toward the road. You want a bite to eat first?”

  I hesitated for a second and then accepted his offer for food. He ladled some of the stew from the cast iron pot into bowls and brought the bowls to the table. He opened a cupboard, tore open a package of flour tortillas, stacked some on a plate. He brought those and some salt and pepper in shakers that had probably been stolen from a lunch counter.

  “What is this?” I said.

  “Just some venison with taters and onions.”

  “It’s marvelous.”

  “I’m kind of partial to it myself. Mind if I ask you a personal question?”

  I shook some black pepper onto my stew.

  “You can ask,” I said.

  “Why’d you come down here and start messing with these guys in the first place?”

  I told him about the plane crash in 1989. When I got to the part about the Harvest Angels being responsible, someone started pounding on the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I hurried back under the bed.

  Dempsey answered the door. A man stepped inside holding the .44 I’d slung toward the bush and the Uzi I’d hidden under it.

  “This your handgun?” the man said.

  “Never seen it before.”

  The man raised the revolver, cocked the hammer back, and shot Dempsey point blank in the chest. Dempsey collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut.

  The man fired toward the bed. The slug opened a smoking hole the size of a quarter in one of the pine boards in front of me, just inches from my face.

  “Come on out, Colt.”

  I squeezed off several rounds from beneath the bed, and one of them found its mark. A flower of dark red blood bloomed from the man’s left kneecap. He shouted and fell to the floor on top of Dempsey. I scooted out, stood, and finished him with one to the head.

  I looked out the window, saw only blackness, but I figured the rest of the posse was somewhere nearby and would be drawn by the gunfire. I took the Uzi from the dead man and walked out. There was a stack of firewood off to one side of the house and something under a large sheet of woven nylon. I pulled the tarp off and to my amazement found a Kawasaki four-wheeler parked there and a metal gas can. I should have known. It would have been very hard for Dempsey to live so deeply in the woods with no means of transportation. I climbed aboard and reached for the ignition switch, but the key wasn’t there. I ran back inside and searched the pockets of Dempsey’s pants and coat, no luck. I opened every drawer and cabinet, fingered the recesses in the recliner, scanned the walls for a nail or a hook. I even sifted through Dempsey’s bag of pot, but the key was nowhere to be found.

  I gave up on it. As I stepped over the corpses and walked through the threshold, I heard footsteps approaching through the dry and frozen underbrush. More than one set. I swept the area with machinegun fire, kept shooting until the Uzi was out of ammo.

  Silence. Either the bursts from the automatic weapon had rendered me completely deaf or the bad guys completely dead. Since nobody returned fire, I figured the latter.

  The Uzi was useless to me now. I tossed it into the house. I looked down at Dempsey and said goodbye. He had helped me. He had been kind to me, and had paid the ultimate price. As I stared into his lifeless eyes, I noticed the tiny metallic beads around his neck glinting in the firelight. I bent down and pulled the chain from beneath his shirt. His skin was cold as raw liver. On the end of the necklace there was a set of dog tags and a small key. I jerked the chain and it broke and I took the key and left the tags on his bloody chest.

  I ran out to the four-wheeler, climbed on, jammed the key into the ignition. Nothing. It wouldn’t start. The battery was dead. I got off and checked the cables. Dempsey had disconnected them. I twisted the terminals onto the posts and tried the ignition again and the engine roared to life. I switched the headlight on and sped into the woods.

  I didn’t know if I’d killed all the men in Stoneface’s posse with the Uzi. Probably not. They had probably scattered. It would have been stupid for them to stay in a cluster. The pistol in my waistband had a twelve-round magazine, and I’d already spent half of those killing the man who killed Dempsey. That left me with six rounds to fend off an indeterminate number of creeps.

  I wasn’t feeling real good about my chances.

  I’d left the .44 magnum in the house, thinking it too cumbersome to carry around. That was my rationale, but that was before I had wheels. Now I wished I had brought the extra firepower. Leaving the revolver was a mistake. My mind was foggy from fatigue and marijuana and I had made a huge mistake, one that could possible cost me my life.

  I motored through the brush in no particular direction. The four-wheeler’s engine was loud and the headlight was on and I was an easy target. I kept expecting to feel a bullet tear into my back, but it didn’t happen. I must have chosen the right path. I must have gotten lucky for once.

  I rode for about thirty minutes and stopped when I came to a strip of gravel just wide enough for one vehicle. I wanted to follow it, but I wasn’t sure which way to go. Left or right? One way probably led to a residence, the other to a road. I wanted the road. Stoneface’s posse would be checking all the houses in the area, same as they had checked Dempsey’s, and I didn’t want to get into a similar situation elsewhere. I didn’t want to get anyone else killed.

  I chose left, pegged the throttle and a few minutes later saw lights through the window of another cabin. I turned around, hoping nobody in the house had heard the four-wheeler’s engine.

  Now I was on the way to a road for sure. I was on the brink of victory. This nightmare was almost over. I could feel it.

  I made it to the two-lane blacktop and again had to choose a direction. I turned right. I wound through the gears, pushing the four-wheeler for all it was worth. It was bitter cold. The speedometer said forty-five, but the stinging needles piercing my face made it feel like eighty. I squinted my eyes into narrow slits, the tears sweeping across my temples and drying to a salty crust almost immediately. My vision was blurred and my lungs were on fire and every joint in my body felt as though someone had pounded it with a hammer. None of that mattered. I was on my way back to the world. I was on my way to freedom.

  Then I heard a siren behind me. I looked back and saw blue lights flashing and within seconds the cruiser was inches from my tail. I slowed down, veered to the shoulder, braked to a stop.

  Through a loudspeaker the officer said, “Put your hands behind your head with your fingers laced together.
”

  I did. He came from behind and slapped some handcuffs on me and then walked around to where I could see him. It was a State Trooper. I tried to blink him into focus, to no avail. The combination of cold wind and sleep deprivation had done a number on my eyes. I couldn’t have fingered him in a lineup if my life depended on it.

  “I can explain,” I said.

  “Stand up.”

  I dismounted the four-wheeler, losing my balance so badly I nearly fell. He frisked me and found the 9mm tucked in my waistband.

  “Like I said, I—”

  “Shut up.”

  He gripped the back of my neck with one hand and the cuffs with the other and shoved me toward the police car.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Shut up.”

  He opened the back door and guided me into the seat. I didn’t resist. It was comfortably warm inside the car. I knew it was only a matter of time before someone would listen to my story. When they realized that I was the good guy and that there were a whole bunch of bad guys back at the ranch, I would be on my way to Florida and Stoneface and crew would be on their way to the Tennessee state corrections system.

  He put the car in gear and made a U-turn. We drove for a few minutes and my vision gradually started to clear. The trooper had his hat off now and I could see his eyes and part of his face in the rearview. There was something familiar about this guy. I thought maybe I’d seen him before, but I couldn’t remember when or where. Then it came to me. It was Tim. His last name escaped me, but it was Tim from the poker game at Ted Grayson’s house.

  The guy with the gun in his boot.

  “Tim. It’s me, Nicholas Colt.”

  “Who?”

  “Nicholas Colt. From the card game at Ted Grayson’s house.”

  He turned around and took a quick glance at me.

  “I didn’t recognize you,” he said. “What happened?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I was kidnapped.”

  “No kidding?”

  “No kidding. Ever heard of the Harvest Angels?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “They have a compound right here on this mountain. It’s just a house, really, and a few singlewides, but they seem to be pretty organized.”

  I told him about my adopted daughter being abducted three years ago and her sister being murdered, and I told him about the Lamb murders and the tilted crosses, about coming to Tennessee to investigate the disappearance of Derek Wahl, about Derek showing up at my house in Florida and me killing him in self defense. I told him about Lester and Chelton and the big guy they called Bear, about being abducted and escaping and finding Pete Strong dangling from a tree branch.

  “Do you know the name of the leader?” he said.

  “I don’t. He says he’s an old friend of mine, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before. I just call him Stoneface. He doesn’t smile a lot.”

  Tim laughed. “Stoneface. That’s a good one.”

  He slowed and made a left turn onto a winding gravel road that led back up the hill. He switched on his brights, bathing a wide swatch of the dead winter landscape in harsh white light.

  In a few minutes, we stopped at a steel gate.

  On either side of it were three strands of barbed wire.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I fell to my side and started kicking at the door, but all I managed to do was strain my left hamstring. Tim was taking me back to Stoneface’s compound.

  “You’re an officer of the law,” I said. “How can you be part of this insanity?”

  “Shut up.”

  He got out and used a key to open the padlock on the gate, drove through and got out again and locked it.

  The lights were on at Stoneface’s house. Tim cruised around to the rear of the building, put the car in PARK, and killed the engine. He drew his pistol and opened the back door and told me to get out.

  “I’m not going in there. Go ahead and shoot me. I’m not going back.”

  “Get out. Now.”

  I didn’t move. He pulled out a walkie-talkie and said something into it and a few minutes later a pair of goons similar to the ones I’d killed in the woods came and dragged me kicking and screaming into the house. They stripped my clothes off, scrubbed my body with soap and water, put a hospital gown on me, and strapped me back into the chair in the lab. A guy in a white coat came in and started an IV in my left arm and hung a saline drip. He connected some tubing to a bottle of the stuff that looked like chocolate milk and resumed my feeding. He inserted another urinary catheter, turned the lights off and left me in the dark. I was exhausted. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep but my leg wouldn’t let me. It was throbbing like a disco. An hour passed, maybe two, and the door opened and the lights came on and Stoneface walked in and sat at the table across from me.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  “I need something for pain,” I said. My mouth was dry, my voice raspy.

  “What’s your name?”

  “You know my name. Why are you playing games with me?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Nicholas Colt. You want my rank and serial number?”

  “Several men are dead because of you,” he said.

  He stared at me for a minute and then walked to the medicine cart and drew something into a syringe and injected it into one of the ports on my IV line. My left hamstring stopped hurting immediately.

  But the medication did more than ease my pain. I felt happier than I’d ever felt in my life. The world seemed wondrous and full of possibilities.

  “What was that?” I said.

  “Do you like it?”

  “It worked.”

  “Where are Brittney and Juliet?”

  “I’ll never tell you that.”

  He turned the lights off and left the room. I was alone in the dark again. I tried to concentrate on my predicament and figure a way out of it, but my brain wasn’t working right. Not right at all.

  I was hungry. I was starving, and the formula being pumped into my gut wasn’t cutting it.

  “Hey, I need something to eat,” I shouted.

  The door opened and the lights came on and the guy with the white coat who’d connected all my tubes earlier came in.

  “What would you like?” he said.

  “A Big Mac and fries. Wait. Better make it two.”

  “Two Big Macs?”

  “Yes.”

  “And fries?”

  “Yes.”

  He switched the lights off on his way out.

  A motorized movie screen came down from the ceiling and an old science fiction movie came on. Black and white. Rocket ships and extraterrestrial aliens. There was a dashing young hero working against the clock to defuse a bomb that was going to blow up the world.

  The screen went black and the lights came on and the guy with the white coat came back in carrying a white bag with golden arches on it and a large drink cup. He rolled an adjustable table to my side, unwrapped one of the Big Macs and spread the wrapper out and put the sandwich on the wrapper and dumped the order of fries next to it.

  “I didn’t know what you wanted to drink,” he said. “Is Coke all right?”

  “Coke’s fine. What’s with the old movie?”

  He ignored my question.

  “You want ketchup?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He opened a package of ketchup and squeezed it onto the wrapper next to the fries.

  “Which hand do you eat with?”

  “My right.”

  He unbuckled my right hand.

  “Enjoy,” he said.

  I lifted the burger and took a big bite. I picked up three fries and dragged them through the ketchup and stuffed them into my mouth. I licked the salt off my fingers. I went at the meal with intensity, finishing the Big Mac and most of the fries in under five minutes. The man in the white coat unwrapped the second burger and I woofed that one down and ate the rest of the fri
es and drank the Coke. He gathered my trash and stuffed it all into the big white bag with golden arches on it and rolled the table away and secured my arm back and turned the lights off and left the room. I fell asleep and dreamed about whizzing through the galaxy in a rocket ship.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I woke up in severe pain. The back of my left thigh felt like a hot chunk of iron pulled from the fire and slammed onto the anvil for hammering. I must have actually pulled the muscle, or maybe even ruptured it. Along with that were the normal aches and pains any forty-eight-year-old man has when he jumps a barbed wire fence and strips his dead friend naked and spends hours traipsing through the wilderness searching for a way out of a nightmare. I had cuts and bruises and blisters and abrasions and a headache.

  I needed another one of those shots.

  I sat there and thought about it. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted it.

  Stoneface came in with a female assistant and a surgery cart.

  “What’s your name?” Stoneface said.

  “It hasn’t changed.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Nicholas Colt.”

  “Since you’re eating, I’m going to remove your feeding tube. If you start cooperating in other ways, I’ll remove the urinary catheter as well.”

  “I need something for pain,” I said.

  “I thought you might.”

  He reached into his lab coat pocket and pulled out a syringe already loaded with medication. He injected it into my IV, and within seconds I was blanketed with a euphoria that was nearly orgasmic. The pain in my leg was gone, and I didn’t have a care in the world.

  “Better?” Stoneface said.

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  It only took him a few minutes to remove the feeding tube. The procedure didn’t hurt. I sat there and watched as though it were happening to somebody else.

  “There,” Stoneface said. “All done.”

  He taped some gauze over the wound.

  “I’m hungry,” I said. “Can I have some breakfast?”

  “Certainly. What would you like this morning?”