* * *
Matt parked out on the edge of Reese Hill Road and started hiking up the public access trail. He was still fuming about Jan hanging up on him and it brought back another thought. The last time he was here he had lost his buck because of Jan. He had bought all the gear for hunting including deer urine. For some reason, the deer urine triggered some irrational thought in her and she forbade him from wearing it. She swore that if he wore it, she would not touch him for a month. So he abided by her wishes and sure enough, just as he was lining up the shot of a lifetime, the wind shifted, the buck caught a whiff of something it didn’t like—most likely him—and bam, it was gone.
He surely could have shot it on the move, but the shot would not have been humane, and if he missed the deer, it would never come back to that clearing again. All he could hope for was another day. Of course, he didn’t talk to Jan for a full day when he got back. That was when they had The Great Urine Talk.
He had fought his case valiantly and in the end it was agreed upon that he could use it as long as it nor any of the clothing it ever touched came into the house or garage. The next day he bought a three thousand dollar shed and it was over. That was surely a victory—he had convinced himself.
Some avid hunters had placed a blind up here and he’d found it where the guy in the sporting goods store said it would be, and it was now his favorite spot. Of course, this late in the season, he doubted his eight-point buck was still around, but he had to try. It was a short hike in, and although late by hunting standards, Matt had a feeling. At just after ten in the morning, lo and behold, his buck came back home.
Matt was going to bag him, dress him, and hike him back to the car the old fashioned way. Then he would have a great hunting tale and trophy to show his old man, who himself owned such a trophy. Venison was not a flavor he could endure, its gaminess too much for him, Jan wouldn’t even try it, but he had an Indian friend who ran the fireworks stand who was going to be very happy tonight.
His friend Big Mike was on disability and was just getting by. Matt had to drive by his place to get home and of course Mike had the stuff of boy’s dreams, so the two of them were destined to meet.
That first day they met was Jon Jon’s birthday and he had stopped in for some birthday fireworks. Of course, Mike and Matt got to talking. Matt just carried that air of openness about him, because it seemed everyone always wanted to talk to him, at least that was what Jan said, only she didn’t say it as a compliment.
He lined up his shot. He could see the neck perfectly as he controlled his breathing. As he was gently squeezing the trigger, his phone started to vibrate inside his breast pocket. He hesitated, lost focus, but got it right back when the very unexpected happened.
He had inadvertently placed it on ring/vibrate and now that the vibrate portion was done, his ringtone of “American Woman” burst out across the glen. The buck shot straight up in the air. When it came down its legs were moving like a cartoon, and much like a cartoon, it wound up running smack into a tree.
It got up stunned, but still panicked as Matt stopped the phone, which read “Jan.”
As before, its legs were moving faster than its mind could control and it ran right back into the same tree, this time though with a cracking sound. It righted itself again, seriously wobbled, and with an unbalanced gait it made its way back into the forest like Dean Martin’s reincarnation.
He could see as it staggered its way up the knoll, that it was no longer an eight-point buck. In its last tree encounter, it broke the left rack. More than irritated he answered the still ringing phone with, “I hope you realize I won’t be talking to you tonight unless something is really wrong.”
He listened and turned white.
The woman on his phone was saying his wife and child had fallen unconscious and were being loaded into an ambulance right then. She said she was at the Woodland Park Playground. Matt replied with total shock in his voice, “Okay, please give her backpack and phone to the authorities and thank you.” He ended the call and was already out of the blind and running before his phone was fully put away.
* * *
Tim Smith came to with a jolt. He was in the water—and it was cold and hot. What happened? He saw the jet was still intact and that confused him even more? He had felt intense heat on the top, and it contrasted to the intense cold of Puget Sound on the lower part of his body. Then the mind fog cleared a little and he became super panicked.
He was searching his mind; the last thing he remembered he was hanging onto the donut shaped buoy, but Julie and the girls had put on life jackets, right? He couldn’t remember Julie putting one on, but she must have, they were on the outer railing.
Rescue boats were everywhere, and they already had a spot where they were ferrying people to on the shore, then coming back for more. Tim realized those were not official rescue boats but local people coming to the rescue. Then he looked left and almost fainted. The entire ferry had cracked in half and was sinking fast. He did a quick assessment of his body and found all his parts intact and working. He had either been blown or drifted about fifty yards from the wreckage, and he still saw people coming to the maw of the sinking ship halves and jumping for it.
He saw a guy jump badly, hit the jagged bottom of the boat, and then began a horrific screaming that Tim would never forget. Realizing his positioning saved him from serious injury, he went into action, looking and calling the girls names out as he swam toward the carnage. The closer he got, the more bodies he found strewn about intermittently, some blown apart, yet he still had to check them for life.
Thus far, none were alive, but none were his wife or daughters either, so he kept it together, he kept looking. The water was starting to get to him and he wondered how long he had been in the water before he had burst awake? He had this feeling that he been treading water in a semi-conscious state for five minutes or so, and it would explain how civilians rescuers were already on the scene.
He came in as close as he dared to the ferry and found a woman who needed assistance. She had clung to a buoy in the Sound, and Tim came from beside her and hugged her into the buoy as she was very weak.
By this time the official rescue units outnumbered the civilians, and a Seattle Fire team arrived to help them. Tim identified himself as he clung to the buoy, hugging the woman against it. Soon, the two of them were on board a boat and heading over to the dock where he had seen people being shuttled. There were ambulances on the Kingston side, and triage had already started.
That was when he saw them in a small crowd on the dock. The fact that they had their legs hanging over the rail probably played a big part in him ever seeing them alive again. He ordered the boat’s driver to go over toward their dock and he jumped out before the vessel could come to a complete stop. Tina and Tammy grabbed him first around the waist, then his wife next as she pulled back and chided, “Show off.”
They turned and saw that the two halves were nearly sunk all the way now. Tim did not know the answer to his wife’s question of how deep the Sound was. His was thinking about how a lot of people saw the ferry as a city bus and never even bothered to get out of their cars. The divers were going to find a lot of entombed people, he feared. And then his mind raced to figure out the cause of all this destruction.
The civilian rescuers were still needed as the plane was being disembarked now with their help. But that still left out the cause of this? Tim had seen with his own eyes that something had hit the remaining plane engine. Plus he had heard the first one.
His head was bursting from the noise of the explosion, as were Julie’s and the kids’. When it was their turn to be given blankets and be checked out by the medics, they were told that the kids needed to be seen by a pediatrician to have a hearing-loss assessment done.
His head was also screaming for answers. He couldn’t take his eyes off the carnage. It was the main reason he had become a firefighter, as he loved to help people. So to make him watch this and not be able to help was a spe
cial kind of torture. Soon the Coast Guard, Navy, Fire, and Civilian crews were able to get all survivors out of the water and headed to hospitals. Tina had suffered mild hypothermia and had a slight concussion, but Tim made the call to not have her go to the hospital as it was going to be a nightmare there, and one he didn’t think they needed to deal with. He was a trained professional, after all.
Too soon they were ferried over to the mainland and were in their car headed home, the luckiest family in America. Every one of them was in some form of shock, but none more than he, for he had the greater scope of all things worldly.
When the world had gone crazy two years ago, he had dealt with some real frightening things. First of all, Julie and he had always been city people—not suburb people, but downtown city people. Julie was a real estate broker who specialized in corporate moves when a company had outgrown their britches. Tim worked at Station 12, which was near the Space Needle. They worked and lived downtown.
The building they had lived in was all glass and exposed to the world. He had always felt a bit uncomfortable, but Julie loved their apartment somehow, even though a person with binoculars could actually see right into their house with little difficulty.
However, after the madness of two years ago, they began to reassess what was important. One of the support rallies for the Jesuit Sheep leader, Pablo Manuel, was held right across the street from their building and it terrified the girls and Julie to the point that they no longer wanted to live in the building.
From their vantage point, they saw and heard many varying viewpoints, some of which were revolution, and Julie figured correctly that if it turned into an angry mob, the big glass building right in front of them was going to be toast. That was when they made the call to move just outside of Everett. It gave them both a commute they’d never had before, but they were able to buy a private property with a fence and a gate and even Julie had to admit, the safety factor was huge for a good night’s sleep. The girls had a yard to play in when it wasn’t raining and they got a dog to boot.
Their life had been going very good, but now that had all changed. Tim was sure he was going to have to set up some family counseling. He looked at his wife and she knew that as soon as they got home safe, he was gone, back to where he was needed. Julie Smith knew the life of a fireman’s wife and it hurt her just a little that everyone else always counted more than they did, even when they needed him, too.
Normally his predictable actions would lead to them arguing, but after what she had just seen, she understood it was selfish of her to withhold her man from doing what he was meant to do. Watching her husband suffer in a situation where help was needed and he sat powerless to provide any was a look she hoped never to see again in her lifetime.
* * *
Robert’s head was racked. In the computer and math world everything made sense. Nothing was ever a surprise and nothing ever fell out of the predictable; but not people. People threw you curve balls. People did the unpredictable. They pissed away chances of a lifetime, for what? Was Tom a criminal? Why would he run? He was the loudest and strongest voice they had. After he left, you could feel the air sucked out of the cyber room.
It was a serious letdown and Robert went into a little funk. They’d decided to meet back in his cyber boardroom at 11:00 am East Coast time today. It was 10:30 and he was not feeling so good. First of all, he had done some pretty heavy research on Tom Holsinger and found nothing. He was no stranger to finding people and keeping tabs on them.
In his backpack was a binder with the profiles of every bully who had ever lived on his block, any person who had run with Runnels and had been part of chasing him down and hunting him like an animal even in his sanctuary. He started off with fourteen live bad guys to keep track of and now he was now down to eight in just a few short years. There had been a car accident, then a construction accident, and a shooting. This was South Philly after all, and his backpack held the proof of what it can be like for a young man bent on destruction. It also held the proof that he was good at finding people and that he had many resources, yet it was like Tom Holsinger just popped up out of nowhere.
It was very troubling, as he had invested so much in the word of a man who was probably a criminal. Hell, he might even be in jail right now and that call was from prison. They get computer time there. The worry on his face was so obvious that Melvin could not be at ease. Normally he left Robert in the library alone, as he was still ashamed of the times he hunted Robert in here like a scared little animal. Not today though, he knew that this meant a lot to him, and hopefully the others would find their own voice and resolve.
They had twenty minutes to go, Melvin was reading Newsweekly, and Robert was tooling around the Internet when came across an article that was written about his new game. It was an article written by Scott Bailey from Seattle whom he liked and had corresponded with by email the month before.
The article was flattering, and as he neared the end of it he observed something that he hadn’t expected. There was a file photo of him, and one of Tom Holsinger. He had told Bailey that Tom was from the Seattle area and Bailey had been able to get the picture no problem, thought Robert. So why the mystery then? If this reporter had caught a photo of him, then he must not have been a criminal, at least not behind bars?
Robert now had an amused smile instead of forlorn, and Melvin asked what the change in attitude was about?
Robert said, “It’s nothing, just that the reporter in Seattle snapped a picture of Tom Holsinger.”
Melvin was up quickly and came over to see. He looked for a long second at the photo and then his face turned into a smile as well as he started smacking the rolled up the newspaper in his hand.
Robert noticed immediately that his friend had something. He was holding out. Melvin did not let him off the hook as he returned to his seat humming and maintained a look like he had the world’s biggest secret, but he wasn’t telling.
Robert played along and said, “Okay, let me guess, you know him?”
Melvin grinned and said, “Oh yeah. We all know him.”
Melvin turned the page of the article he was reading around so Robert could see it and Robert almost fell out of his chair exclaiming, “It can’t be!”
Melvin smiled a rarely used smile, showing an awesome set of teeth and said, “Oh, but it can, and it is.”
Robert had to sit and compute. Melvin knew the look of genius working and stood by silently. After a few moments he came out of it and said, “We need to go to Seattle and talk to him. If we can get him to come out and do this, it will be the tipping point, don’t you see it, Melvin?”
He realized that although Melvin had come a long way, he still was not quite an erudite scholar either, so Robert explained as a mentor. Robert chose his words carefully so his friend could understand the true gravity of this revelation.
“Melvin, Matt Hurst was a national scorn, but ever since President Caulfield exonerated him, he has become a national curiosity. Not only that, Melvin, he is also someone who had been up close and personal with Pablo Manuel and his sycophants. We are talking super-immersion.
“One could spin it that the sheep did it the wrong way, but Matt figured out a way to make sweeping change without all the warfare. We could parlay that into being the catalyst of a great movement, maybe picking up sheep followers looking for direction. We’d have a movement with real power, one without wrath. No rioting, no name calling, just good old calculated decision-making that is for the good of country. Pack your bags, my friend, we’re going to set out on a journey, and the end result could be the biggest thing to ever hit this country—a new kind of power that is apolitical.”
They both saw it was time to join the others in the cyber world that Robert had created. Melvin inquired, “What will you tell them?”
Robert answered matter-of-factly, “The truth, of course, and like the Man said before they killed him, “And the truth will set you free.”
Melvin asked, “What man was that?�
��
Robert said sincerely, without the slightest hint of a patronizing tone, "Dr. Martin Luther King, Melvin, and one day you and I are going to sit in this very place and discover together why he was much more than a Monday off of school and work.
* * *
Madness was not the word for what Matt was feeling. It was more like crazed insanity. His Explorer could go way faster than the eighty-five he was doing, but not safely now that he was on I-5 and headed the ninety miles to Seattle.
He was trying to remember exactly what the lady had said on the phone, something like, “The lady whose phone this is and the small boy with her both passed out and the ambulance is finally here. It took a long time but when one showed up there were no paramedics or police.”
Confused, Matt asked the person he was speaking with to give the cell phone to the authorities, thinking that they were going to show. But now he was concerned that it didn’t happen as no one was answering the phone. He had tried three times now and he foolishly had not gotten the good Samaritan’s name or number.
He decided it was time for some deductive reasoning. First, he would call his parents at the house, just in case someone had tried there. He would ask his dad to walk upstairs and check his machine. His parent’s house was under theirs. They were living in what used to be the guest quarters when the house was a Bed and Breakfast.
No luck. He tried the cell he’d bought for his parents, and of course it went to voice mail. Finally he tried the house and got his answering machine. He wished he would have set the auto-retrieval code, but he had decided he would never use it. He wondered how many times doing things the lazy way had cost in him in his life? His mind started reasoning. Why would they both have passed out? Jesus, he thought, TJAC wouldn’t have gone after his family, would they? He needed answers.
He knew they went to their favorite park after Jon’s pediatric appointment and that was right near Northwestern Medical Center. Children’s Hospital was also nearby. He started with Northwestern. After the preliminary computerized options were forced upon him, he pushed zero and the operator answered. He explained his dilemma succinctly and the operator said words he didn’t comprehend. She said that unless his wife and child were in imminent danger of dying, they would have been referred away; they were only handling life-threatening issues at the moment. Matt asked, “Why?”
Without Wrath (Harbinger of Change Book 3) Page 15
