by Jason Ross
Sage pushed into the climb and let the sweat and the cold numb him. He decided to take it one-thing-at-a-time, and now, he knew what was next: the arms and lips of Aimee Butterton.
Sage reached the police cruiser with time to spare. He didn’t bother driving into La Grande. He needed her touch and he could shower at her house.
He parked the police cruiser around the corner from the Buttertons, then walked the last quarter mile on the gravel lane. There wasn’t nearly as much snow in the town of Elgin as Wallowa Valley, a thousand feet higher in elevation.
Sage knocked, and Mrs. Butterton showed him in. He was the first to arrive for the Sunday visit. His eyes followed the swing of her ass in her customary denim, and he almost missed the loaded glance that Mrs. Butterton shot Aimee as she showed him into her room.
What was that? he wondered.
Then, the sight of the girl swept away any rational thought. She was dressed in cut-off shorts with the fringe hugging the line where her ass met her legs. On top, she wore a perfectly-crisp, white T-shirt that rode the curve of her breasts like the snowfields he’d just crossed to get here. He could almost see her nipples finishing the perfect curve with a “screw-you” to gravity.
He blinked, wordless. She laughed out loud.
“Don’t just stand there.” She flashed her bright smile. “Go shower.”
Sage realized he still wore his snowshoeing getup: layered, merino wool top, fleece mid-layer and a wind shell. He’d worn his snow pants to the house because he had nothing else to change into.
“Does your dad’s closet have, um, a pair of sweats or something I could borrow? Maybe a T-shirt, too?”
The mention of her dad sent a cloud across her face, but her smile returned. “Yeah, but you’re going to be swimming in them. He was a big guy. I’ll find you something. They’ll be outside the bathroom door.” She pointed toward the hallway. “To the showers, Soldier.”
Soldier?
Sage tore his eyes away from her breasts and headed out of her room. It took a second for him to identify the door that must be the bathroom—the slightly narrower one. He didn’t want to wander into her mom’s room by mistake. She’d probably be getting made up for the captain.
Sage dreaded the coming debrief with Chambers. Once he told the captain what he’d seen, there’d be no way to stop the coming conflict.
Heck, he thought as he dug through the cupboard for a towel. There probably wasn’t anything he could do anyway. Captain Chambers had his cap set on taking down Commissioner Pete. Sage was just the new guy following orders.
He hurried through his shower because the water was ice cold. The natural gas lines had died long before Sage had arrived. After the miserable shower, he reached blindly into the hallway and felt a stack of fabric. Indeed, it was a pair of unfamiliar underwear, some gray sweats, and an “Elgin Eagles” T-shirt.
Aimee laughed when he returned to her room. “We need to fatten you up, young man.” She reached over and pulled him close by the waistband of the sweats.
He let himself be tipped off-balance, and fell on top of her on the bed. He was freezing and needed her warmth. They toppled into a deep kiss, and from there, directly to the good stuff. Sage abandoned his worries while they had sex, but afterwards, his grinding guilt returned.
As much as it seemed like a bad idea, he couldn’t stop himself from talking to her about his misgivings. The flush of hormones swamped him and his mouth proceeded without checking itself. He knew he should minimize risk of something bad getting back to the captain, but he had an agonizing need to sort this out.
Could he trust her?
Aimee took it surprisingly well—the story of his recon into Wallowa. He told her about Commissioner Pete and his dog. Sage admitted that he was having second thoughts.
She listened in silence until he finished. “You’re not from around here,” she stated the obvious. “You don’t know our history, and you don’t understand the rivalry between Wallowa and Union. We share a lot of family ties. Ranch land has gone back and forth, split so many different ways between siblings, cousins and distant relations. Today, there’s bad blood everywhere you look. Pete Lathrop and Wallowa County screwed us over, big time, when they deeded the Zumwalt prairie over to the Nature Conservancy. In one stroke, those tree-hugging assholes sold out the elk hunting land we’d used for the last hundred years. You don’t understand, Sage. Trust me—Commissioner Pete is NOT who you think he is. He’s a dirty, double-dealing bastard. If you get the chance to knock him down a peg or two, you take it.”
Her eyes burned with fury—an anger that’d probably been passed down through her DNA. When she said the words “ranch land” it almost rhymed with “holy ground.”
Then, she flashed back to her effervescent smile and his apprehension melted away. “I’m just saying,” she reiterated, “you’re doing the right thing, helping Captain Chambers. One word of advice, though: you can talk to me about this stuff, but don’t ever talk to anyone else. That’s how you get hauled to the county line. Right?” She smiled again, as though she’d just told him her favorite band was Fallout Boy.
Sage nodded. He was in over his head. He had no idea what was going on here. Telling Aimee had convoluted the situation even further. What in the literal fuck was up with these people? He resolved that his best play was to follow her lead.
He nodded again, and packed his regrets away in a box in his mind labeled “She Said.” His shoulders released some of their tension and came down from up around his ears.
Aimee took his head in her hands and laid him down on the bed. She massaged the back of his neck for a long time. Then they went for a second go-round.
18
Mat Best
McKenzie City Hall
McKenzie, Tennessee
* * *
Another rat raid, more deaths. This time on Joy Drive in the northwestern corner of town. They were up to thirteen murders in town at the hands of desperate refugees, and that was aside from the hundreds of thefts. The town had experienced more crime in the last three months than in the previous thirty years by a factor of ten. Mat suspected the refugees numbered over twelve thousand now—four times the population of town.
McKenzie City Hall buzzed with the security and food committees. The latest murders on Joy Drive refreshed their terror. An elderly couple had been stabbed to death in their bed.
The massacre at Brashear wood camp hadn’t been widely gossiped. Those who participated in the killing weren’t bragging. Some had vanished from sight. Very few of the strike team came to Parker’s funeral.
Mad Scientist Jensen showed up to the committee meeting with another milk crate of jars, and a massive, white gun that had to be some kind of pneumatic launcher. Mat kicked himself for not insisting the science teacher come on the strike at Brashear wood. Maybe that would’ve pulled him up short.
Sheriff Morgan began the meeting and turned the podium over to Mat.
“During the strike on the camp at Brashear wood, we lost one man, Deputy Rickers, plus three wounded, all expected to fully recover.”
“How many’d we kill?” a man from the food committee interrupted.
“There were forty-six enemy casualties.” Mat looked down at notes he didn’t have. The room went still.
“At least now they know we mean business,” the same guy interjected, this time at half volume.
“Yes, to the extent that other refugees might learn what happened there, and if they know why we did it, they know we’re capable of wiping out a camp. But conducting military strikes against the camps is like swatting mosquitos on a dog. The more we swat, the more we’re going to get bit. If we try to put a bullet in every refugee, we’ll run out of bullets long before we ran out of refugees.” His last sentence hummed with frustration.
“So, then what the hell we gonna do?” the guy blurted out.
“Finish the HESCO barrier and continue to patrol, assess and strike—mostly around the corridor to the town of Henry. We’r
e being ambushed along the highway again, almost daily.”
“What about our neighborhoods?” the woman who’d replaced Marjorie Simms on the security committee asked. Gwen Sizemore—Mat remembered her name because she was a thin, older gentlewoman. The exact opposite that her name implied..
Mat held out his hands as though he wished he had a better answer. “We need to get that wall done and we need to increase our neighborhood patrols.“
It’d rained every day since Brashear wood. The townspeople had slacked off on HESCO work and on neighborhood patrols because of the discomfort of being outside in the weather. Mat and the team had a devil of a time getting people to work security in the rain.
“So, you’re saying we need to keep doing more of the same? The same thing that’s getting half-a-dozen of us killed every week?”
It was an exaggeration, but a fair assessment. Their town wasn’t secure. That was a fact.
Mat ticked off what they had accomplished. “The HESCO’s almost half done. We haven’t lost hogs in weeks. We’ve rounded up a dozen possible HVTs—rat leaders likely to start something against us. The Creek Camp has moved on, en masse, for greener pastures, many miles from here.”
The FEMA camp trick had been kept a secret—only the security and food committees knew Mat was responsible for drawing away Creek Camp. His trick worked, but only because Creek Camp and Dr. Hauser were so cooperative. The committee had talked about doing it again, but other camps were too hungry to travel even ten miles.
Mat ran out of things to count on his fingers after four, and he’d been standing in silence for a few seconds. He wanted to talk about his new camp spy initiative, but he hadn’t decided if he should keep it secret or not. He’d been recruiting informants from the camps by trading food for information. Would it leak back to the camps if he talked about it in committee?
“Um, Sergeant Best? If I may?” Mad Scientist Jensen stepped beside him with a jangling crate of ugly jars.
Mat would’ve rather dealt with a hundred angry hecklers than this guy. Mat normally carried himself with the confidence of a warrior, but he came off as flat-footed around Jensen. Whenever Jensen stood up in a meeting, Mat felt like he’d stumbled into an ambush.
Mat wanted the town to accept their losses and be patient. He wanted them to knuckle down, work harder, endure the rain and finish the damned wall. They were not quick, sexy solutions, but that was all Mat had. Mad Scientist Guy, on the other hand, could trot out weapons of mass destruction and monstrous guns.
Jensen set the milk crate down on the table. “Gwen, would you please pass me the launcher?”
The egghead had literally brought a bigger gun to the meeting. As much as he wanted to tell the town that whiz-bang technology could work out to be a very dirty means of victory, he didn’t have the words. Should he tell them about Perez and his oxy habit?
Jim Jensen jumped into the gap left by Mat’s hesitation.
“Of course, you’re right.” Jensen gestured toward Mat, now standing beside him. Mat didn’t know about what he was right about, but Jensen nodded at him with an unctuous smile. Gwen Sizemore passed Jensen the plastic, PVC cannon.
Nobody would be satisfied until they knew what the big gun did. A new weapon was a hell of a lot sexier than building a wall out of junk in the freezing rain. Mat meandered around the table and dropped into the closest chair, helpless to stop the tide of Jensen’s oratory.
“Again, thank you Sergeant Best. Without you, we wouldn’t have made it this far. Now it’s time for the town to really dig in and support you.” Jensen then talked about how the town’s ingenuity was its strength—about how they’d solved a water quality problem thirty years back using science.
It was an exhibition of carefully chosen words and phrases designed to gather the committees to Jensen’s way of thinking. He talked about their shared fears, and the staggering number of the refugees around them—12,000 and growing. He stoked the revulsion, outrage, and fear the townsfolk already felt. He preyed upon their fatigue. He feasted on their frustration.
When Jensen shifted to the “science” of leaving food, poisoned with botulism, for the rats to find, Mat saw way too many heads nodding agreement.
Mat wanted to stand up and scream, so now we become Nazis? But before he could find the words, Jensen bent the room to his artful turn.
He held out his hands and offered reason to go with the science. “These people are dying. For all intents and purposes, they’re dead already.” Jensen talked about the “peace of death” in one’s sleep as the botulin toxin slowed the responsiveness of the diaphragm.
It was Susan Brown, the biology teacher, who finally interrupted his roll. “Mr. Jensen, I believe you may be exaggerating the peaceful nature of death by botulism poisoning.”
Jensen didn’t miss a beat. “Well, Susan, I can’t deny we’re discussing death, and death is certainly unpleasant. But avoiding death, for the refugees, is not a reasonable possibility. We’re all logical people, here. We understand facts. Winter is far from over and the desperation and peril that surrounds us will double, then double again. Eventually, refugees will swarm over our wall. Eventually, they will cannibalize us. They will eat our children. I’m not exaggerating.”
Apparently, Susan Brown couldn’t disagree because she said nothing in response.
Jensen continued. “I propose we task Sergeant Best’s night patrols with depositing food laced with botulism in the woods surrounding our town.”
“What’s the cannon?” Mat blurted out. He didn’t have the words to stop the inevitable vote on mass poisoning, so he tried distraction instead.
“This,” Jensen said, and hefted the white, bulbous gun, “is an air cannon that launches glass jars. It’s the solution to your bullet shortage, Sergeant.”
The gun was five feet long, made of heavy, plastic irrigation tubing. Underslung beneath the main barrel, a compression tube gathered air pressure from a compressor to launch a glass jar. The “trigger” was some kind of pneumatic ball valve on the knuckle between the compression tube and the cannon barrel. Mat had seen the same design for potato guns when he was a kid back in Santa Barbara. Somebody on the committees gasped, but with a thrill instead of a shock.
Mat knew he had lost the fight against WMDs.
“We can launch canisters of anthrax, or better yet, mustard gas, at anyone who approaches our town perimeter.” Jensen patted the barrel of the cannon like a good Labrador retriever. “If a refugee camp commits crimes against our town, we can surround them and bombard them without ever stepping foot into the danger zone.”
“I’m sure you’ll address issues of wind, and the risk of gassing the town,” Sheriff Morgan spoke for the first time. “You’re getting to that part, right?”
Jensen smiled and nodded. “I still have a battery of tests to perform before I can present anything solid. I brought the cannon to show you my progress.”
“Are we going to vote on the botulism thing,” the loud guy from the food committee said.
Sheriff Morgan interrupted, and his voice carried great authority. “Beatrice asked me to share something with you, and now’s as good a time as any.” Sheriff Morgan unfolded a half sheet of paper he’d been gripping the entire meeting, and read with a voice that made it instantly obvious: he was reading words from the Bible.
“His disciples came to Him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and already the hour is late. Send all these people away, that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and find bread; for they have nothing to eat.’ But He answered and said to them, ‘You give them something to eat.’ And they said to Him, ‘Shall we go and buy two hundred denarii worth of bread and give them something to eat?’ But He said to them, ‘How many loaves do you have? Go and see.’” The sheriff finished reading the passage and sat down without explanation.
Silence hung in the room, broken only by one member whispering to another. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Another low voice coun
tered, “Thank you, Sheriff.”
Both committees voted on the botulism plan, and while not everyone agreed, it passed.
Candice had just finished a sponge bath when Jim Jensen burst into the house with his ego smoldering. She heard him coming and wrapped a towel around her body before he stormed into her bathroom.
“Your little friend’s adopted father, or whatever he is, wasn’t even a speed bump. We were worried that he’d try and stop our innovations, but I blew him away like flatulence in the proverbial wind.”
Candice had no idea what Jim was talking about. She was having trouble concentrating on anything other than the fact that she was naked, wet and vulnerable. An excited Jim was a dangerous Jim.
“What happened?” asked Candice as she considered whether there was enough room to slip past him without making it obvious she was fleeing.
“The rifle jockey voted against our botulism plan.”
“Oh,” Candice said, and edged closer to the door. “That’s terrible.”
Jim seemed to notice her near nakedness for the first time. His speech slowed as his eyes ran down her body.
“I won, of course. He can barely string two sentences together. The committees are all behind me now.”
Jensen smiled as he caressed the terry cloth towel where Candice had tucked it near her left breast.
“I’m the only one who can save this town, Candice,” he said with a husky edge. “Right?”
“Yes. We need you.”
Jensen gazed through her, lost for a moment. “Yes, the town needs me. And I will save them.”
Jensen‘s fingers plucked at the tucked corner of the towel. It came free and fell.
