And Thy Mother Page 10

  “And which would you choose?” Jim wanted to know.

  When Mike hadn’t answered within a second, Jim stopped walking and looked in astonishment at his fellow officer.

  “Don’t tell me you actually have to think about that.”

  “From your reaction, I can guess what your choice would be,” Mike countered.

  “You’re damn right,” Jim replied. “If I could fight my way out of that corner, I wouldn’t care what some non-military jackass wanted me to do, even if he is the President.” He added, in a disgusted tone, “Surrender, just because I’m near some Wall? That’ll be the day.”

  They were wearing civilian clothing, to avoid attracting unwanted attention. Of course, being the only people for miles around would tend to get them noticed, anyway.

  “So, which way do we go now, chief?” Mike asked. “We head east, back toward that last motel we stayed in—can’t be more than thirty miles, and we might catch a ride on the way…”

  “… And, also, the location of our ‘last known sighting’,” Jim reminded him.

  “… or, do we continue west, to face who-knows-what?”

  “Sure wish I had me some coordinates,” Jim said to his phone, as if that alone would make it ring. It didn’t.

  While they stood in the early morning fog, Mike asked, “What was your reaction to last night’s ‘lesson’? It sounded pretty far-fetched to me.”

  “I’m not sure what to make of it, either. Most of the things they told us prior to this have seemed in the realm of possibility, at least. We certainly opened a can of worms inquiring about that ‘accident’ in Phoenix, so I think that much is true. At this point, and despite the lack of evidence—”

  “I’m still waiting for some of that,” Mike interjected.

  “—I’m still gonna give the women the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Let’s take a hypothetical situation,” Mike offered. “Say, it’s me—I did something bad…”

  “You did—you hung around me a couple of days too long,” Jim pointed out.

  Mike continued, ignoring the interruption. “Something I didn’t want to do. Maybe it’s because of a disease, maybe somebody’s threatening me. Whatever the reason, I did it and now I’m suffering because of it. I’m beaten down, and beaten down some more, again and again. I’m probably gonna feel a lot of… anger, hatred… toward the people beating me down, to the point where, in retelling the events, I might… exaggerate… my plight a little.”

  “That’s your impression of last night’s story—an exaggeration?”

  “Not necessarily—I just… I was trying to imagine what I would have done in Thompson’s position. As the story went on, his actions followed a logical progression, and I was sometimes able to anticipate them. I was thinking, alright, he’s got to do something… protect the men… keep them apart from the women, so now… he’s gonna do this, and he did… kinda… but more often than not, he went a little ‘overboard’.”

  “They made Thompson sound like he was insane—and you were thinking like him? Does that make you insane, too?”

  “I hardly think so,” Mike countered, hoping his partner was only joking, “unless it’s from hanging out with you. But seriously—I didn’t say I agreed with his actions. He took a much more extreme approach than I would have done. I mean, some of that stuff—I can’t see how anyone, even a President, could get away with treating half the population like shit. Especially someone as dynamic and forward-thinking as we’ve always been told Kenneth Thompson the First was.”

  “Putting all this together,” Jim responded, “I’m pretty sure that a lot of things are not the way ‘we’ve always been told’ they were.”

  “On top of all that,” Mike continued, “Angela said this was only Phase One of his ‘plan’. What more could he have done in a ‘Phase Two’? But the big question still remains unanswered—where did they go? If things got so bad for them, as Angela said, did they all decide to up and leave? Where are they?”

  At this point their ruminations were interrupted by the last thing either of them expected—the horn from an 18-wheeler. It was heading west, but came to a stop when its driver saw them on the roadside.

  The passenger door opened and the driver looked down at them. “You boys need a lift?”

  Nodding to the man, Jim said to Mike, “I guess we’re heading west.”

  They grabbed their gear and moved toward the truck cab. The driver slid back over to the driver’s side, opened that door and began to climb down.

  “You just stow your gear in the sleeper. One of you can sit there and the other can ride shotgun. While you’re doing that, I wanna check my brakes—feel like they’re losing air pressure.”

  It only took Parker and Wilkins a minute to get settled. While they waited for the driver to finish re-attaching his air brake hoses, Jim, who had decided to take the front seat, looked around the cab, checked various compartments, and sighed quietly with relief. Standard instruments, standard radio—no guns.

  Jim’s cell phone rang for an incoming text message. It was their mysterious friend, with a new set of coordinates. Jim showed them to Mike as the driver reentered the truck and settled into the driver’s seat.

  He turned to his right, extending his hand. “Sam Swenson. You boys got names?”

  Jim shook his hand and introduced himself as, “Jim Bailey, and my buddy, Mike Cannon.” The driver was a short man in his late forties or early fifties, with a moustache and brown hair badly in need of a trim.

  “So where you boys headed, Jim?”

  “Well…”

  “Just down the road a ways,” Mike finished for him. “Doing a little geo-caching.”

  “Hell of a place for that,” Sam commented, looking pointedly at the Wall.

  “Yeah, well… we’re in this… extreme sports club—you know, skydiving, base jumping, exploring caves, shit like that. I guess somebody thought this would be a good place to do some ‘extreme geo-caching’.”

  “Somebody thought right,” Sam said, sliding the truck into gear.

  “What about you, Sam?” Jim asked. “What brings you to these parts?”

  “Somebody’s idea of a joke, I think,” he responded, shifting his attention every few seconds from the road to the Wall. “Just hauling a mixed load—paper, canned goods, spare parts, nothing perishable—and my dispatcher gave me some bum directions.” He chuckled to himself. “Shoulda realized it when I passed the ‘Last Chance Saloon’ in this little town back yonder…”

  Jim and Mike remembered that saloon, near the last motel they had stayed in.

  “… but there’s supposed to be a road heading off to the south coming up in about twenty miles, and south is where I’m going, away from this accursed Wall. So I can take you that far, at least.”

  Jim glanced at Mike, who handed the cell phone back to him. The coordinates had been erased from the screen. Mike said to Sam, “That should be fine.”

  As soon as Sam got the truck up to speed, he felt the trailer rock as though it had been impacted by something. Jim and Mike felt it too. Jim looked in the passenger-side mirror but couldn’t see anything. Mike and Sam checked the driver-side mirror and saw a car approaching at high speed. A man with a gun in his hand was leaning out the passenger window. He fired again, and another bullet struck the trailer.

  “What the…” Sam asked, shaking. He tried to duck down in his seat, but couldn’t go very far and still maintain control of the rig.

  Jim reached behind him and grabbed one of the rifles they had recovered from the previous day’s assassins. “Looks like our friends do have friends,” he whispered to Mike.

  He slung the rifle over his shoulder and opened the door. “What the hell you think you’re doing?” Sam shouted.

  “Just gonna teach these guys it ain’t polite to shoot at trucks,” Jim responded as he climbed out onto the steps. “You just keep this thing moving, maybe weave a little. Keep them behind us. If they try to move up alongside, push ‘em off th
e road.”

  Another shot hit the truck. Sam turned an ashen face to Mike. “You know these boys?”

  “Better than we’d like to.”

  Jim, out on the entry steps, grabbed onto the handle at the back of the cab to steady himself. Then, using it as a pivot, he launched himself up over the spinning tires onto the small platform behind the cab that covered the front drive axle. From here he could see the car, but was mostly hidden from their view by the trailer.

  Another shot from the car hit the reinforced corner of the trailer near Jim’s head and ricocheted off. They had spotted him.

  He ducked back out of their sight, and tried to bring his rifle around into position, but had to grab onto something quickly. The car had accelerated and Sam obediently slid the rig to his left to block the maneuver, knocking Jim off-balance in the process.

  The truck weaved back and another shot struck the top of the cab. If Jim had been standing up straight, it would have gone through him. These guys are definitely better shots than yesterday’s goons, he thought. He knew he would get only one chance.

  He looked up and spotted the “glad-hands,” the receptacles for the hoses which pass electricity and air from the tractor to the trailer. They stuck out slightly from the otherwise flush back wall of the cab. Next to them was a rack which held the truck’s spare tire. That might work…

  The truck swung to the left again and Jim stood up. Bracing himself between the glad-hands and the tire rack, he aimed his rifle at a point just behind and to the left of the trailer. There was nothing there at the moment, but he knew that would change as soon as…

  The truck veered back to the right. Steady… three…

  The driver of the car became visible around the back end of the trailer. Two…

  The rig finished its move into the right lane. One…

  As Jim expected, the car immediately moved into the left lane to try another run. The driver was now centered in Jim’s sights.

  He fired.

  The driver was struck in the chest and immediately lost control of the car, which turned sharply to the left and began sliding sideways down the road. Its front tires slid onto the shoulder and the gravel prevented the car from sliding any further. Momentum carried it over onto its right side; then it was upside down, right side up, then over again, and again…

  It came to rest on its roof.

  Sam also saw the car roll over and brought the truck to a stop. Jim swung back from between the wheels and reentered the cab. He handed the rifle back to Mike and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  “What was that all about?” Sam asked, as he started the truck moving again.

  “I guess they thought that we weren’t… playing by the rules,” Jim gasped.

  “Are they dead, or just wounded?”

  “Out here… what with bears, wolves, bobcats… one’s as good as the other.”

  “Why didn’t they just… complain to the leader of your club, or something?”

  The absurdity of the question rendered Jim speechless for a moment. Then he said, “We told you… it’s ‘extreme’. Extreme thrills—extreme penalties. Besides,” he continued, looking at Mike, “I think the ‘club leader’ is very aware of what we did.”

  They drove on in silence, with Sam now paying much more attention to his rearview mirror than before. Mike broke the silence once to ask, “Is it my imagination, or is the Wall closer to the road than it was before?”

  A few more miles, and Sam brought the rig to a stop. A short way ahead was the intersection with the southbound road Sam had been expecting.

  “Well, boys, there it is. You’re welcome to ride on south with me as far as you want, but if not, then I gotta let you out here.”

  Jim and Mike declined his offer, with thanks, and began to gather their belongings, but then they noticed something else. On the southeast corner of the intersection was a building, with a small parking lot in front of it. It had the appearance of either an office building or a small hotel; the two officers were hoping it was the latter. It appeared to be about five stories high, but they couldn’t be sure of this, for it had very few windows with which to accurately measure its height. It was painted the same dark gray shade as the Wall and, even stranger, the building and grounds had no signage or corporate markings whatsoever.

  They climbed down from the cab and Sam bid them farewell, saying, “You boys take care, and watch out for those ‘club members’ of yours.”

  “We will,” Jim answered, “and good luck finding your way home.”

  “I’ll have great luck, once I get away from that mess,” he said, indicating the Wall, which at this point was no more than three hundred feet north of the road—Mike had not been imagining.

  With a last wave, he set off. Jim and Mike watched him go. He approached the left turn but, to their surprise, did not slow down. Instead, he accelerated and went past the turnoff, continuing down the westbound road. The men looked at each other, puzzled.

  Seconds later they watched in horror as an enormous explosion engulfed the tractor. Even from over a thousand feet away, they could feel the heat of the fireball, and the road shaking beneath their feet. Eventually, the truck rolled to a stop but continued to burn.

  “You think, maybe, one of those shots hit a fuel tank?” Mike asked quietly.

  “Most likely,” Jim responded.

  “Maybe what they say about the Wall being a ‘place of evil’ is true, after all.”

  “Could be but, evil place or not, he didn’t deserve that. He was a good man.”

  Then, in a final gesture of respect, he came to attention facing the burning rig, and rendered a crisp military salute to their fallen comrade. Mike understood and did the same.

  “Time to be about our business,” Jim said at length. He picked up his gear and began to walk, but stopped when he heard a commotion behind him. He turned and discovered that Mike had fallen on his face.

  He got up and dusted himself off. “Tripped on something,” he said sheepishly. They looked back and saw something metallic, just barely breaking the surface of the ground. Mike kicked some of the dirt away from it, exposing a fairly thick piece of rusted steel. He kicked the metal, but it didn’t budge.

  “That’s odd, all right, but it isn’t what we came for,” Jim said, turning back to his belongings. “I’m much more interested—”

  “Hey, Jim, check it out,” Mike interrupted. “Something’s going on at that building over there.”

  Instinctively, they backed away from the road and hid behind a bush. From this vantage point, they could see the front of the building without being seen, although both men realized with dismay that their gear was very visible on the roadside. They drew their weapons in case someone came to investigate.

  A car had come up the southbound road, the one Sam had wanted to take, and pulled into the parking lot of the unmarked building. As Jim and Mike watched, three men got out. The rear-seat passenger was a man in his fifties, with graying hair. The driver and the front-seat passenger appeared to be considerably younger, early thirties at most. One of them was blond; the other had red hair. All three men were very well-dressed. A moment later, they had entered the building, the oldest man going in first.

  Jim and Mike emerged from their hiding place, relieved that none of the men had noticed them or their gear.

  “So, what do you think that place is?” Mike wondered. “Office building or hotel?”

  “I’m really hoping it’s that second choice.”

  “Sure would be nice if they identified themselves.”

  “Well, since they don’t,” Jim replied, “I think I’ll go ask.”

  Mike gave him a questioning look. “You might be under-dressed.”

  “The worst they can do is throw me out,” he countered.

  “I doubt that’s the ‘worst’ they could do,” Mike said to himself.

  Jim sprinted across the westbound road and walked along the shoulder of the southbound road to the end of the parking lot.
It was quite small, with a maximum capacity of only about eight cars, although at the moment it held just the one. The lot was not gated, there were no security guards and, as far as Jim could tell, not even any security cameras. Incongruously, although the front of the building was menacing-looking and grim, with its dark gray coloring and few windows, it was nicely landscaped.

  He walked up to the front doors, which were made of heavy, dark-colored wood. Each door did have a pane of glass in it, however. These were thick and not meant to look through, and each one had a strange design carved into it, which he did not recognize.

  Thinking no more of it, he opened a door and entered what looked very much like a hotel lobby. There was a desk across from the door, and a man stood behind it, studying the contents of a computer screen. He was as well-dressed as the three men from the car, who, Jim noticed, were nowhere to be seen.

  He went over to the desk. The man behind it did not look up.

  “Excuse me,” Jim tried to sound as innocent and unassuming as possible. “I wonder if you could help me? See, my car broke down back up the road a ways…”

  The clerk finally raised his head and regarded Jim with a condescending eye.

  “Do you have a reservation… sir?” he asked with disdain dripping from every syllable.

  “Well, no… like I said, I just broke down and… by the way, what is this place?”

  “If you haven’t been invited, you don’t need to know,” was the icy reply. With that, the man returned his full attention to his computer terminal.

  Seeing that no more information was forthcoming, and not wishing to make a scene, Jim turned to leave. On his way out, he noticed the doors again. He was certain he had seen an image similar to the ones in the glass before, but couldn’t remember where.

  Mike was relieved when his partner returned, obviously unharmed and saying, “They threw me out!”

  “Did you learn anything, though?”

  “Only that the guy behind the desk is a smart-ass,” Jim said, replaying his encounter with the “snooty bellboy,” as he called him. “It was like, since I wasn’t ‘invited’, whatever that means, I didn’t exist.”