by Jon Land
“Not like you to be so nervous, Captain.”
“Yeah, well times change. People, too. You wanna see why I’m nervous? Come here and I’ll show you.”
Captain Seven led Kimberlain through the technological expanse of the first railroad car. Everything was dark and sleek, shiny black leather furniture built precisely to fit its allotted slot. The carefully arranged interior was filled from floor to ceiling with flashing lights, diodes, CRT screens, monitors, switches, and assorted electronic equipment and data banks. They passed all of these en route to the second of the connected cars. Seven slid the doors open and led Kimberlain in.
The captain’s living quarters didn’t look appreciably different from the preceding car. A single bed and chair battled for space with more of his equipment that had overflowed from next door. A television screen that curved sharply at the edges dominated one wall. Seven had made a three dimensional projection system for Kimberlain that surrounded him and allowed him to watch films as though he were a part of them. The only reason Captain Seven had not devised a similar system for himself was the limited space available in his railroad-car home.
“What’s this?” Captain Seven asked him, holding up a plastic contraption bristling with tubes and dominated by liquid-filled chambers.
“Your favorite bong for smoking your Hawaiian lava-bed pot. As I remember, it doesn’t have to be lit.”
“So right. Breathing in supplies all necessary combustion. What I did was mix up a compound that reacts with oxygen. Formula was tricky, but I had some free time. Notice anything else?”
“It’s empty.”
“Fucking A right it’s empty. Know why?”
“Your supplier blow town?”
“I quit, Ferryman, and it’s fucking killing me. I smoked that stuff for thirty-three years, since I was nine, and never had a problem. Now I give it up and I’m a fucking basket case.”
“Then why quit?”
“Prove to myself I could do it. Like a challenge.”
“More like a mid-life crisis,” said Kimberlain, eyes fixed on the captain’s graying locks.
“Sorry, man. I skipped right over that just like I skipped adolescence and young manhood. Spent my adolescence in juvie for blowing up a school and my young manhood in the Nam ’cause I did the job so good they had to build the fucker up from scratch. Fucking recruiters got a strange screening system.”
Captain Seven sat down on the bed with his bong, cradling it as a young girl would a doll. Kimberlain took the chair.
“SF boys want those who can get them results,” he said.
“Yeah, Special Forces was a good tour. They don’t ask how, they just say do. More results the better. Nobody asks questions. Then they busted up the unit, reassigned me. To light infantry or some shit like that. I gotta write reports all of a sudden, you believe it? Get approval from cherry lieutenants ain’t never seen blood ’fore I can drop Alka Seltzer in water. Came up with this perimeter defense system once, like claymores only you plant the explosives on trees instead of in ground. Thing I’m figuring is the lead gook trips a normal wire, he gets blown to shit while his buddies hit the ground firing. So I come up with a system where all the lead guy does is trip an activator, and maybe five seconds later, when his gook buddies are in the kill zone, my mines kick in. Effect would be like ten .50 calibers sweeping the Z and none of our boys within a half mile.”
Captain Seven was still cradling the bong in his lap, like a napping child.
“So I go to one lieutenant who sends me to another lieutenant who sends me to a captain who says, ‘Gee, that’s an impressive idea, but it sounds too excessive.’ Can I come up with anything he can sell easier to the colonel? So I tell him to aim his ass at the gooks and light a match to his farts. See if that’s less excessive enough for him.”
Kimberlain laughed.
“Hey, Ferryman, I ever tell you my shit story?”
“Plenty of them, Captain.”
“I mean the one. Goes like this. Course you couldn’t know it ’cause it was before your time, but one of the big problems in the Nam was what to do with all the shit. I mean camps could get pretty raunchy if they didn’t watch themselves. So I came up with a way to turn the shit into a methanelike gas that would make napalm look like sunscreen. This time I get to see the colonel himself. Says he likes the idea and hands me a dozen forms to fill out. One of the items says I got to send a sample of materials for testing. Jesus Christ, it’s like they didn’t know there was a war on. So I figured fuck it and did what they asked: I sent them a bag of shit.”
“And that’s what got you sent home,” Kimberlain thought he remembered.
“Not exactly. Took the fucks two weeks to figure out what it was.”
“You got twenty-four hours to figure out what I got for you today.”
Captain Seven’s eyes glistened. “’Nother locked room murder?”
“Better. Mass escape from the MAX-SEC wing at The Locks.”
“How many?”
“Eighty-four.”
“Leeds?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, fuck.”
Captain Seven bounced off the bed and dashed to the black clothes chest. The top drawer yielded a plastic bag that he opened to reveal a pile of finely milled, greenish-black marijuana.
“Hawaiian lava bed,” he pronounced. “World’s finest.”
“I thought you quit.”
Seven began packing the pot into the proper chamber. “Yeah, that was this morning. But I need my wits about me now.”
Captain Seven sucked in on one of the chambers. The water pulsed and bubbled, and suddenly smoke was everywhere, churning through the labyrinth of passages en route ultimately to his lungs. The captain moved his mouth away and held the smoke in with his eyes squeezed closed.
“Ahhhhhhh,” he exulted seconds later, eyes coming open. “That’s better. I’m ready now. Talk.”
Kimberlain told him the story as Vogelhut had related it, describing the physical logistics in detail and stressing the time constraints involved.
“Fucks sure pulled off a lot in six minutes of darkness.”
“Head man is certain that’s all they had. So what we got is a highly fortified installation on an island in the middle of a raging storm. Even if the inmates had walked out of their cells, where the hell did they go? How did they get off the island?”
Captain Seven took another long hit off the bong. When he spoke again, his voice sounded nasal, hoarse from the happy fire in his throat.
“Go home and get some sleep, Ferryman. Leave the impossible to me.”
“Twenty-four hours, Captain.”
Seven reached over for a battered jean jacket planted on a hook. “Get there by dawn if I hit the road now. See you for breakfast the day after.”
Kimberlain headed back for his cabin in the woods of Vermont as soon as his business with Captain Seven was completed. He hated long drives, because they left him with only his thoughts to keep him alert. Tonight those thoughts had trudged backward to the origin of the Ferryman.
He had finished training with the Special Forces and been accepted for a tour with the antiterrorist commandos composing Delta Force, when word of his parents’ death reached him. He was granted an emergency leave to attend the funeral. He would be the only relative there, the only one left besides a sister who had fled the strict Kimberlain home and had never returned. To his father she had no longer existed. His mother had cried a lot over it. Kimberlain, only a boy at the time, barely remembered her.
The base commander at Fort Bragg had hinted that unusual circumstances were behind the deaths of his parents, and Kimberlain found out the truth in the hours before the funeral. Apparently they had been touring California in their recently purchased RV when mechanical problems forced them to pull over. His father must have stubbornly insisted he could fix it himself, and the problems had dragged on past nightfall when the aging couple became prey for a gang of bikers. The gang decided to expropriate the
RV for themselves. Shots were exchanged, and by all accounts, his father put up an incredible fight. But in the end the sheer number of the bikers won out, and both his parents were killed.
Kimberlain had been given the day of the funeral plus two additional days leave from the base. At the grave site he ignored the clichéd phrases of the unknown minister, his mind on other things. He had smuggled a .45 off Bragg in his duffel, and if he needed more than a single clip to finish the job, he deserved whatever fate awaited him.
The plan he would use developed quickly. He remained in the civilian suit he had worn to the funeral and pulled a cap over his standard army haircut. He rented a huge Lincoln at the nearest Hertz, paying cash for the iron monster. He drove to the bar that was the known biker hangout and from the outside found it packed with an unruly crowd of leather-clad drunkards and roisterers. Judging that it would be at least midnight before the crowd began to disperse, Kimberlain bided his time.
He left the bar around 11:30 and drove south. All the bikers lived in a housing development just off Route 15, and he picked a spot in the meager spill of a streetlight to pull over. He jacked up his car and yanked a rear tire off as if it were flat.
Dozens of bikes flew by him without stopping. A few slowed. Obscenities were shouted. Kimberlain started to consider what he might do if the night finished this way.
He didn’t have to consider long. Seven of them pulled up. They had driven by initially, then circled back. It took all his self-control to wait for them to make the first move, and when they did it was over very quickly. Kimberlain killed the first two and the last one with his bare hands. In between he used the .45, connecting on every shot. Inspection of the bodies when he was finished revealed the gang leader not to be among them. Kimberlain returned to the bar and barged into the back room where he found the gang leader meeting with a tall well-dressed man.
“Fuck!” the leader roared when he saw Kimberlain coming.
But it was the well-dressed man, strangely, who drew a gun. By then Kimberlain had managed to grasp the beer-slowed leader and spin him into the line of fire. The biker took four of the gunman’s bullets, then crashed backward against Kimberlain, separating the Ferryman from his pistol. With bullets still coming, Kimberlain tore a chain from around the dead man’s chest and lashed it outward. The jagged edge tore into the gunman’s throat and shredded it. Kimberlain left him there in a puddle of blood, gasping toward death.
Kimberlain left California without giving the bikers another thought and drove the Lincoln straight through without sleep to Fort Bragg, where he confessed to the MPs. Military jurisdiction won out, and he was placed in the stockade to await summary court martial. Hanging was a very real possibility, life in the stockade a certainty. Or it would have been, if the man from The Caretakers had not come calling.
“You have skills that are perfectly suited for a special group I represent.”
“What group?”
“You’ve never heard of us. Very few have. We’re called The Caretakers. Capital T, capital C.”
“And what exactly do you do?”
“We take care,” the man had said. “Of the country.”
And for nearly three years after being “removed” from the stockade, that was what Kimberlain had done. Each Caretaker was expert in the trade of killing, but none more so than he. The enigmatic blind leader of the group who called himself Zeus christened Kimberlain “Charon” after the mythological ferryman who took the dead across the river Styx. The anonym couldn’t have proved more fitting. His first two years were marred by not a single mission failure. All those chartered for passage across the river Styx completed their journey.
But in the end his own ticket had proved one-way. His last assignment culminated with him being left for dead by his own people; by Zeus, by all of them goddamn it! The long days of flight alone through the jungles of Central America crystalized his predicament for him. To destroy evil he had become evil. The Caretakers themselves were evil. By alerting the proper authorities, Kimberlain forced the issue. Having their existence revealed in the wrong Washington quarters was more than The Caretakers could take. They were dissolved as quietly as they had been formed.
He had managed to avenge himself on those who had wronged him. Yet he remained unhappy and unfocused. He desperately missed the action of the field and the purpose it gave him. Despite its falseness, it had at least provided a center for his life, and without that center he felt out of balance, useless. He needed to feel worthy again; he needed to matter.
The initial solution came to him quite by accident. A former Caretaker he had worked with had become a sheriff in Southern California. His Orange County district was being plagued by a series of stranglings, and he asked for the Ferryman’s help. Kimberlain overcame his initial reluctance and found that taking up the chase allowed him to employ the skills so long a part of him and so sorely missed. Yet now he was in control. His work resulted in the strangler’s capture, and his reward was a deeper understanding of himself. He was a hunter, and a hunter needed to hunt. More than that, he was a monster, and only by tracking down other monsters could he atone for his past. He began working on his own, uninvited, to track down the most loathsome of criminals.
And yet this, too, left him unfulfilled before very long. To track down these monsters he had to enter their thoughts, and even before his encounter with Winston Peet the hate was telling on him. He had thought that pursuing the deviants who own the underbelly of America would somehow vindicate him for his actions as a Caretaker. Yet their victims were still dead, just as his were. He lay in the hospital those long weeks after his encounter with Peet and considered the track his life was on, no longer satisfied with it. Everything was death, his entire existence still defined by it. Nothing had changed, and nothing would until he found a way to breathe life back into himself.
But how? The Ferryman gazed out at the world and saw pain. Everywhere he looked were people who had been wronged and were helpless to avenge themselves. Their lives had been taken from them. Often the system was to blame, a system he had once been part of. A system he had killed for. He realized that the best means for him to live again was to help others do the same. Offer them a lifeline in the hope of grabbing hold of it himself.
And so the paybacks began. Slowly at first, irregularly spaced until word leaked out and he was flooded with more requests than he could fill. There was no set procedure to reach him. But word continued to spread. People with a need for his services always seemed able to find him somehow, and he helped them because the process allowed him to help himself. How many lives had he taken or destroyed as a Caretaker? Kimberlain hadn’t counted back then, just as he didn’t now count the specific number of people helped by his paybacks. He knew there was a balance to be achieved, and he would feel it when he got there. Until then, the paybacks would continue.
He was spared further thinking when the private road leading to his cabin appeared two hours before dawn. He snailed down the unpaved road in his four-wheel-drive Pathfinder, careful to check his portable perimeter monitoring system at various junctures along the way. None of the alarms had been triggered, none of the traps sprung. The cabin would be as it had been when he left.
He was halfway between the Pathfinder and the porch when he saw the crinkled piece of paper stuck to the cabin’s front door. It flapped in the breeze like a shirt tossed over a clothesline, and the bold print grew clear in the moonlight just before the Ferryman was close enough to touch it:
Came here as soon as I could. Sorry I missed you. Will call again.
The words made little sense until the next breeze lifted the top flap to reveal the note’s signature:
Andrew Harrison Leeds
The Second Dominion
Trails
Saturday, August 15; 6:00 A.M.
Chapter 7
“WE’LL BE OUT of here as soon as we can,” Talley promised.
“There’s no rush; so will I.”
“For good?�
��
“Until this is settled. My security’s been broken. If I stay here, Leeds or one of the others is bound to come back.”
Talley had made it up to Vermont in record time, three hours from the time Kimberlain’s call reached her. She had traveled in the same Learjet as the day before, once again, she claimed, to the bureau’s chagrin.
“You’re getting good at bending the rules, Ms. Talley.”
“Only slightly, Ferryman.”
Kimberlain’s eyes narrowed. “I see you’ve been checking files.”
“Just one. I was especially interested in the more complete details of your paybacks.”
“Really?”
“For personal reasons. We have a deal, remember? I give you free access to The Locks. You help me with Tiny Tim.”
“Meaning …”
“A visit to the town he hit three nights ago to tell us what we’re missing.”
“Later.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“It’ll have to be for now. I want to hear what you’ve learned.”
The forensics team that had accompanied her was still inspecting the grounds when they stepped from the porch into Kimberlain’s cabin.
“Whoever it was came alone,” Lauren Talley reported.
“It was Leeds.”
“We don’t know that for sure yet.”
“I do.”
“The handwriting doesn’t match what we have on file.”
“You really don’t know much about Andrew Harrison Leeds, do you? I can show you five different examples of his handwriting, all different.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Not for Leeds. Any traces of a vehicle?”
