Authors: David Vinjamuri
“Isn’t it normal for protestors to be arrested in that situation?” I asked.
“Arrested yes, but the companies don’t often press charges. Local cops usually let protesters plea bargain for nominal fines. This time, though, they pressured the locals to go full bore. They targeted the college kids. A bunch of our volunteers spent the last month of their summer vacation in jail.”
“That seems pretty harsh.”
“You betcha. After the sentences were handed down, Paul brought me in again. This time it was to his office and he didn’t offer me a seat. He was still all smiles, but he asked me not to interrupt ‘the important work of our enterprise again.’ Then he turned his back and two security people escorted me out. He brought me in there to show me who was boss. It was a typical male power thing,” she said, shaking her head. “No offense.”
“None taken. Did you stage an event like that again?”
“Several. But we got very little press—just a single national article—and the toll on morale was high. Some quit. It’s normal to have some turnover at the end of the summer because of the college schedule. But we lost more than we expected and it shook a lot of people up.”
“Is that why Josh and Amy quit Reclaim?” I asked, remembering that Heather left when they did.
“Partly,” she replied. “There were some other issues among us. But the biggest thing was that we had different ideas about how to stop the mine.”
“How’s that?”
“I’m an environmentalist. They’re protesters. There’s a difference. That’s all I’ll say.”
“So what did you do when your co-founders quit?”
Roxanne’s shoulders dropped. “Whatever I could to keep the movement from folding,” she said with a trace of sadness.
“If you weren’t hurting the mine, why do you think your people were attacked?”
She shook her head. “It was a senseless, terrible thing to do. I spent most of the day yesterday and today in a hospital in Charleston talking to angry family members. I feel like I’ve let my people down. So many of them are so young. And John and Marcus—they were two of the brightest.” Her hand formed a fist and she banged it on the table in slow motion. Then she composed herself.
I changed the subject. “I went to the Creative Collective Farm commune this afternoon,” I said. This made her smile.
“They’re a hoot, aren’t they? I always wonder how many of them are related.”
“They were...enthusiastic. It seems like Heather left there a couple of weeks ago with a guy she was dating.”
“Harmon.” Roxanne said the name with distaste.
“Everyone seems to have that reaction,” I observed.
“No doubt. I think it’s because he makes such a strong first impression. You meet this guy and you think: holy buckets, could he be
this
nice? I mean he’s a tall, blond sweet-talker with great manners. Half the girls in our camp were swooning the day he arrived. But it didn’t take long to find him out. You can’t keep up an act like that for long in a working camp. People get cold and hungry and then you see what they’re really made of. Anton got mean when he got tired. He nearly put one of the other volunteers in the hospital because of an argument over chores. I put him on notice and I’d likely have kicked him out if he hadn’t left first.”
“So why was Heather with him?”
“I don’t know. Some gals think they can fix the bad ones. Some look for the wounded birds. She latched onto Anton right away. He was old enough to like ’em young. And she would have believed him if he told her the moon was made of cotton candy.”
“Can you think of anything that might help me find him?”
Roxanne shook her head. “Just don’t turn your back on him when you do.”
10
Four men were waiting for me in the parking lot of my motel. They sat in an old Jeep Cherokee with a bad paint job and a rusted out panel on the driver’s side. I spotted them from half a block away as I approached the motel in my GTO. I drove past them without looking, so I could plausibly feign surprise when they jumped me, and parked in the middle of the lot rather than directly in front of my room door. I might have done that anyway, out of habit, but it seemed prudent as the four men piled out of the Cherokee.
I popped open the glove box and pulled out a small metal rod. Then I stepped out of the GTO and marched straight toward the door to the motel room next to mine, showing my back to the men emerging from the Cherokee. My eyes darted toward the picture window of the room I was approaching. The blinds were closed and the window reflected enough light from a street lamppost to make it a full-sized mirror. The four men moved awkwardly, more like nervous schoolboys than professionals. I saw chains wrapped around a fist, a baseball bat and a heavy length of pipe. Then the fourth man—the biggest, fittest looking one of them—slid an enormous Bowie knife from a sheath and tossed the sheath back into the Cherokee. Without hesitating, he started trotting toward me well ahead of the other three men, moving as silently as he could manage.
It was a blitz attack of the kind that a serial killer might use to abduct a teenage girl. It might even have worked on a soccer mom or a jet-lagged tourist, but I wasn’t either of those. I didn’t turn as the man crossed the parking lot, pretending instead to fumble with keys as I stood in front of my neighbor’s door. I got a clearer look at my attacker from his reflection as he drew closer. He was an inch or two taller than me, with straight, spiky brown hair and a short, uneven beard. His nose was too large for his face and it looked like he’d grown the beard to compensate. He was wearing thick, black-framed glasses that might have been manufactured in the 1950s.
As he got within three strides of me, the bearded man pulled back his knife arm like a rattlesnake preparing to strike. I think he planned to skewer me to the door with that Bowie knife. He sprinted the last two steps to give himself some momentum.
I waited until the last possible moment, until he was leaning forward and fully committed. Then I spun right, moving out of the path of the knife. I hit the middle of his forearm, blocking the blade away from me and toward the door. Then I tripped him. He went flying into the door, and the knife buried itself in the cheap wood. Before he could stop himself, I drove my forearm and shoulder into his back. He hit the motel room door flat on and I heard the hinges break and the frame splinter an instant before the door gave way. He fell with it, landing flat on his face in the middle of the motel room. There was a high-pitched scream and an angry baritone voice from within. I turned to deal with the other three men.
I flicked open the 16” Leverloc extendable baton I’d been gripping as I stepped forward and juked left toward the fastest of the three men. He was thin and chalk white, but he jabbed at me like a flyweight boxer; I could see that he was setting me up for a roundhouse with his other, chain-wrapped fist. I ducked back from the jab. Then as his ironclad punch powered forward, I brought up the knife-edge of my hand in a circular motion and bobbed to the side. The blow whispered past my ear. I grabbed his extended arm at the wrist with my blocking hand and pulled him off balance. Then I brought the baton in my other hand down hard on the side of his elbow.
As I felt the joint wrench, I turned again, wrapping my arm around the back of his neck as he staggered forward. I spun him around full circle like a matador with a bull, just in time to meet the tip of the baseball bat a bald man was swinging hard at me. It smacked the thin guy solidly on the top of his skull and I heard a crunch of bone as his skull fractured. He dropped flat to the ground when I released him.
I leapt forward before the bald man could take another swing with the bat. I swept my forearm straight up, catching him under the chin and pulled him backwards off his feet. I wrapped my arm around his neck, pressing hard on his carotid arteries. With my free hand, I raised the Leverloc to parry a blow from the last man standing, who wore an Army surplus jacket and a brown hunter’s cap with the earflaps pulled down. He swung again hard with the pipe, bringing it down like a hammer. I blocked the blow with the Leverloc raised horizontally and kicked his shin with the reinforced toe of my boot. He swore.
I felt the bald man go limp in my grasp as he lost consciousness and I dropped him. The guy in front of me thrust his pipe forward like a sword, and I parried with the baton. Then I lunged forward, driving the tip of the baton into the soft spot two inches below his Adam’s apple. He started to choke and dropped the pipe, his hands moving instinctively to his throat. I sprang forward and to his side as I dropped to one knee. With my arm extended straight out beside me, I drove the side of my balled fist into his solar plexus. He crumpled to the ground.
I heard a heavy step behind me and rolled as a big black boot swung through the space where I’d been kneeling a second before. The big guy had extracted himself from my neighbor’s motel room. He turned and tried to kick me again while I was still on my knees. I caught his boot with my hands and twisted, then spun to kick the other foot out from underneath him. He fell flat on his back and I made it to my feet while he was still struggling to get up. Stepping in behind him, I drove three fingers into a spot just below his armpit. The human nervous system works like an electrical circuit, and you can short it with training.
Only it didn’t work. He twisted around as he stood and grabbed me by the throat instead. The big man pulled me toward him with a surprising amount of strength. The guy’s mouth opened and I realized in a terrifying moment that he was going to bite me. His breath was foul and his pupils were dilated enormously. I tried to ignore the fact that I couldn’t breathe and managed to get an arm in front of me, pressing it under his jaw before he could tear into my face. Then I kneed him hard in the groin. He didn’t flinch. He clawed at my face with dirty, ragged fingernails, so I dropped the baton and slipped my hand from his grasp. Without warning, I pulled back the arm I had under his jaw and brought my forehead down on the bridge of his nose, breaking it. Then I knocked the inside of his elbow with mine and managed to pry his hand off of my throat.
The guy was insanely strong, but not terribly quick. I stepped behind him and tripped him as he turned to confront me. When he stumbled, I grabbed him by the elbow and the back of his collar and slammed him into the window of a Chrysler 300. It shattered and he howled madly, then bulled himself straight backwards, trying to knock me over. I got an arm around his neck and locked it in. I ducked my head down between his shoulder blades to keep him from butting me with the back of his skull.
I rode the big guy like a bronco as he yelled, struggling and staggering around the parking lot. He backed me into a car, whipped me around, even knocked me into a lamp pole, but I kept hanging on. After an eternity that probably lasted no more than ten seconds, the man went limp as he passed out. I lowered him to the ground and, seeing that the other men were still immobile, slid down against the black 20-inch rims of the Chrysler to catch my breath.
* * *
“You’ve had quite a day,” Sheriff Casto said as I held a chemical ice pack to my neck. The first police cruiser rolled into the motel lot less than two minutes after I finally got the big guy down, while I was tightening a tuff-tie I’d slid from my forearm down around his wrists. The quick response wasn’t surprising—we were within walking distance of the county courthouse, after all. The ambulance arrived a moment later and quickly sped off with the two men who’d suffered head trauma.
“Yes, sir, I have,” I replied. One of Casto’s Deputies, Mark Collins, was standing with us. He had the bearing of a professional lawman and wore a Stetson hat with his uniform.
“You took down four guys single-handed?” Collins asked.
“They were a little clumsy. Most of the damage came from them running into each other.”
“Bullshit. I’ve seen guys like you before. Which branch?”
I eyed him again. He had the look, so I didn’t dodge the question. “Army,” I admitted.
“I was Navy. Shore patrol,” he said. “What unit?”
“Fifth Special Forces.”
“Yeah, that’ll do. That’s why the couple in Room 8 back there said it looked like someone was filming a Chuck Norris movie in the parking lot.” Collins smiled.
“I can promise you that it was nothing like that. Just a little self-defense.”
“I hope we don’t see a
lot
of self-defense around here, then,” Casto muttered.
Me either
. “Someone really doesn’t want me around, that’s for sure. What’s the deal with that one?” I looked over at the big guy, who’d just regained consciousness. Four deputies were struggling to subdue him. Even flexi-cuffed, he was shaking them off. One of the deputies pulled out a Taser.
“My money’s on Bath Salts,” Collins says.
“Bath salts?” Sheriff Casto asked.
“New drug,” Collins explained. “It has synthetic cathinones, and it’s supposed to give a high like cocaine or methamphetamine but with different side effects. Started showing up last year. It was originally imported from Asia but now they’re manufacturing it in meth labs in the hollers. Until this summer they sold it in packets labeled ‘not for human consumption,’ and it wasn’t even illegal here. But now it’s against federal law. They’re calling it the ‘Zombie drug’ because an addict chewed off some guy’s face in Miami.”
We watched a deputy Tase the giant a second time.
“He tried taking a bite out of me,” I observed while I checked my ribcage. I would have some bruises but nothing was broken.
“I don’t know whether this is happening everywhere, but the local blend is driving people crazy. We’ve seen a big spike in violence over the last few months. It’s started to hit the rave scene, so we’re finding high school kids amped up on it. When they get really worked up on Bath Salts, they don’t feel pain.” Collins nodded over to where the big man was still struggling. “How’d you get the flexi-cuffs on him, anyway?”
“I stopped the flow of blood to his brain first.”
“Yeah, that’s what my wife does with me. Looks like a bunch of it landed on you, though,” Collins observed, gesturing to my face.