Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (99 page)

Basilio Ramos complimented himself in spite of his agonizing pain. He had cheated death again!  He was still alive!  The rest was a matter of iron will and a test of his unbreakable determination. Now he had two reasons to live.  No matter how long it took, no matter what he had to do, he would pursue them both until his last breath.  Fueled by limitless hate, he would never give up his quest for revenge, not even if it took the rest of his life.

***

“So, where are we going?”
asked Ranya, whispering into Alex’s ear.  She was still squeezing him around the neck with both of her long bare arms, their faces pressed together.  The cargo door remained open behind them,

forgotten.

“We?”

“You heard me Alex. Where are we going? You, me, and our son.”

Our son…
  “I don’t know,” he answered.  “The free states?  Idaho maybe? How about Wyoming, or Montana? What do you think?  Do you know anybody up there?”

“I think you should just tell the pilot to fly northeast until we’re almost out of gas.  We can decide later.”

He lowered himself onto the empty fourth seat, and she followed him down without resistance, her arms still draped around his neck.  She sat sideways across his lap, their cheeks lightly touching, sharing breath and watching their son sleeping in the seat in front of them.

Epilogue

The park ranger had to scrounge for a ride
out to the call, the report of a dead body found near a natural spring on the edge of the Borrego Desert. A father and son had been flying a remote control model airplane at their campground. The model plane went down, and when they went to find it, they found human remains as well.  Soon after the ranger arrived, he found the witnesses in the campground. He knew perfectly well that they were living at the spring fulltime, against the park regulations, but so what? Why mention it?  Especially when he had to bum a lift out to the springs with one of the offending campers. 

Halfway through the month and his office’s meager allotment of gasoline was already finished, and they wouldn’t get another credit put on their government account until August.  For now, he was in the ironic position of depending on the good graces of the very people he would have written up for citations in the old days.  The fuel rationing meant that most of the time the park rangers just hung around at headquarters, shuffling paper and playing computer solitaire.  “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work” was how most of the rangers put it.

At least this group of “non-permitted long-term campers” kept the area around the spring-fed lake and their campground under the palm trees clean and orderly.  He’d seen worse, much worse—biker gangs, Mexican Mafia meth labs and bizarre quasi-religious cults.  This group was just trying to get through the hard times with a minimum of pain, and a little joy where they could find it.

The man who found the body said that he was a former aerospace engineer, and he made a joke about how he was now fixing model airplanes for a living.  This witness led the ranger on foot a half mile east from the springs.  They stopped at the edge of a small berm, almost a cliff or escarpment, which ran from north to south for hundreds of yards.  It was no more than ten feet from where they stood at the rim, down to the level of the sandy desert that continued beyond.

The body was halfway down the angled slope.  It was a male, partially buried in the sand.  He was lying on his side, wearing only black fatigue-style pants.  Long brown hair blew across what was left of his face. One leg was visible above the sand; the cloth at that knee was completely ripped away.  The fingers of his right hand were curled into desiccated hooks, the skin abraded away down to the bones.  His bare skin was burned red and black, and showed clear evidence of wild animal predation.

The witness said, “He’s got no ID on him at all.  No wallet, nothing.” 

“If he doesn’t have any ID on him, it’ll be a DNA job,” said the park ranger. “Looks like he doesn’t have any fingerprints left, and that face sure won’t help much—not after the coyotes found him.  I’ll take some pictures, but I’ll be honest: I don’t think anybody is going to care enough to come out and collect him.  Nobody’s been reported missing out this way.”

“Do you think the coyotes got him after he was dead, or before?” asked the man who had radioed in the report.

“I don’t know.  It looks like he was struggling hard here. Maybe he was fighting the coyotes, or maybe he was just trying to get up the slope.”

“How long do you think he’s been here?”

“Hmm…hard to say.  The desert can be funny, what it does to a man. Hey, look there: his leg is broken, see?”

“Yeah, I noticed that,” said the witness.  Visible bone shards protruded through the dead man’s blackened skin, beneath his knee.  A tourniquet made from a nylon belt was strapped around his ankle, and the end of his bare foot was badly mangled, and encrusted in sandy black scabs.

“Man oh man, that had to hurt like the devil!” exclaimed the ranger. He slipped off his sunglasses and lifted his binoculars to his eyes, and surveyed the rippling sand to their east.

“You think his truck broke down out there somewhere?” asked the witness.  “Maybe he crashed into a ravine.”  Even without binoculars, the dead man’s back trail through the crusty sand was clearly visible, drag marks leading out into the trackless waste where shimmering waves of heat mirage made everything blur and disappear.

The ranger continued scanning through his field glasses.  “There’s no car or truck out there I can see.  If I had the gas, I’d take my jeep and follow his trail.  Maybe he was in a plane crash, I don’t know.  There’s nothing out that way for thirty miles but sand and rocks.  Think about it: he might have crawled for miles on that busted leg!  He would have seen your palm grove from way off.  It might have taken him days just to get this far and after all that, he just couldn’t get up this final slope.  Look at all the scratch marks, look how hard he tried!  But he just couldn’t push himself to the top with that busted leg.”

“Poor bastard, he was so close,” said the witness. “Another half mile, and he would have made it to the springs, and we could have saved him. Even if he’d just have made it to the top, we might have seen him.”

“Yeah,” said the ranger, “He was damned close.  Poor devil almost made it.  I’ll bet he went through hell on earth before he finally died.”

***

Regular mail delivery in the Texas Panhandle
had been temporarily suspended, and temporarily had long since dragged on into permanence.  If you wanted your mail, either you went to the post office twenty miles away in Tascosa, or you didn’t get it. Mark Fowler had permission to pick up the mail for everybody at Caylen Barlow’s RV camp, and on the days when he drove to Tascosa he became the unofficial mailman, as well as carrying passengers and general cargo in the back of his truck.  The mail rode up front in boxes, under his watchful eyes and the protection of the .45 caliber pistol that rarely left his hip.  As usual, he saved his most important drop off for last, including a small package that almost seemed to glow with significance.

The little package was addressed to Mr. Caylen Barlow himself, postmarked from Cody, Wyoming on July 16, with three cancelled $25 dollar stamps for postage.  It was a square carton the size of a CD or DVD, and the return address said only ‘Ranya, Free State Wyoming.’  This had sent Mark Fowler’s curiosity into overdrive, so he rode all the way up the long drive to Caylen’s ranch house to hand it to him in person.  He’d never admit it to a living soul, but he’d had a deep and abiding crush on Ranya Bardiwell from the first moment he’d met her at his outdoor shooting range, the day she took all the prizes with his best competition .45.

His old friend was sitting in his wheelchair on the shady veranda of his ranch house, listening to AM talk radio.  The radio was turned up loud enough to be heard across the yard.  The talk show host was shouting about the upcoming Constitutional Convention.  The leaders of the Poor People’s Party were threatening to surround the convention site in Philadelphia with two million demonstrators, in order to pressure the delegates into passing the “Economic Democracy Amendment.” The white-haired rancher turned off the radio as his friend stepped out of his truck in front of the house.

A ceiling fan was spinning above Barlow, and a silver pitcher of iced tea glistening with condensation was on a table in easy reach.  Even with the temperature still over 100 degrees in the late afternoon, the elderly ranch owner was wearing long pants, and a yellow short-sleeved shirt with buttons and a collar.

“Hot enough for you Caylen?”

The old man replied, “You call this hot? Why, it’s barely warm.  I’ll tell you about
hot
someday, youngster.  Say, whatcha got there for me, big Mark? Anything worth putting my glasses on for?”

Fowler walked up the front steps with Barlow’s mail.  “Yep, I’ll say. This one is from Ranya Bardiwell.  Actually, it just says Ranya, but how many Ranyas do you figure we know?  Looks like she made it out of New Mexico after all,” he said, pointing to her name in the corner, and then to the postmark as he handed it over.  “Maybe it’s pictures or something.”

“Sure, maybe it is,” agreed the old rancher, turning it over and studying it.  “Seems kind of heavy for just a CD.”

“Well, aren’t you going to open it up?”  Fowler stood directly in front of his wheelchair-bound friend, making it clear that he was going nowhere until his own personal interest was satisfied.

Caylen Barlow fumbled to put on the reading glasses that hung around his neck on a piece of string.  He took a small penknife from his pocket and attacked the thick brown wrapping paper, which was both taped and glued in place.  Under the paper there were several layers of heavy-duty aluminum foil, and beneath the foil, the CD case was sheathed in layer after layer of fiberglass reinforced strapping tape.  

As Barlow peeled the tape back, a small gold coin was exposed.  He pulled it from the sticky side of the tape, and examined it closely with the magnifying reading glasses perched on his nose.  It was about the size of a regular dime, or maybe a hair smaller.  It had an arrowhead design on one side and the portrait of a scowling Indian’s face on the other.  Beneath the portrait it said, GERONIMO, and above it, 1/10 OZ. FINE GOLD.  He continued to unwind the tape, and he had peeled off dozens of the coins by the time he got to the actual CD jewel case.  He handed the thin gold coins to his friend Mark Fowler as he freed each one.

“Looks like she did okay for herself,” noted Fowler, hefting several ounces of jingly coins in the palm of his hand.

“Yep, looks like she did indeed,” agreed Caylen Barlow.  “So what’s gold going for these days, anyway?”

“In blue bucks? Almost $8,000 an ounce, last I checked.”

At last Caylen Barlow opened the case, his old fingers shaking as he found the seam and cracked apart the plastic shell.  Inside, there was a single photo between two CDs, one disc on each side of the case.  

Ranya Bardiwell was shown from the waist up astride a chestnut horse, her face lit with joy.  A small boy with light brown hair and blue eyes was sitting in front of her, holding the horn of a western saddle. The boy was wearing a camouflage t-shirt, a toy six-shooter holstered on his hip.  Jagged mountains lined the distant horizon behind them.  “My son Brian” was hand-written on the top of the picture, across the blue sky.

“You reckon that’s Wyoming?” asked Caylen Barlow.

“I guess it is.  Ranya sure looks happy.  What a smile she’s got!”

“Her boy too—handsome little feller. Wonder who took the picture?”

Mark Fowler thought,
I don’t have a single clue, but I sure do wish it was me
.  Then he swallowed hard and said, “Hey Caylen, what’s on those CDs?”

The disc on one side of the case had a note written on it in black marker. It said: “Professor Johnson’s Last Class—NOT for children!”

The other disc was inscribed with: “Crashing Wayne Parker’s Vedado Ranch Traitor Convention—feel free to make copies.”

“Holy Moly!” exclaimed Caylen Barlow, looking between the two CDs.  “Christmas in July!  Which one are we going to watch first?”

“Hell, I don’t care—go fire up your computer, and I’ll grab the beer!”

Matthew Bracken
was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1957, and graduated from the University of Virginia and UDT/SEAL training in 1979. He is married, has two children and lives in Florida.

Matt recently completed
Castigo Cay,
a departure from the Enemies trilogy.  Thirty-something Dan Kilmer is a former Marine Sniper who lives outside an increasingly unfree United States.  A short-fuse rescue operation forces him to sneak back into South Florida, while always flying under the official radar. Read the first quarter of Castigo Cay and all of Matt’s novels at
www.EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com.

For signed copies, send $22 per book to:
STEELCUTTER PUBLISHING
P O BOX 65673    
ORANGE PARK, FL 32065