Liberty or Tyranny (9 page)

“Okay. It’s not important. I’m not interested in hunting your family down. All I want to know is what you’re doing in this area.”

“Why?” the man asked.

Nate sighed, losing patience. “I was hoping to avoid crippling you, but if you answer another question with a question, you’ll regret it.”

“I was delivering the boxes strapped to the back of that semi.”

“And what was in those boxes?”

“HE, small arms ammunition, a little food, and propaganda leaflets.”

“Who were you going to deliver them to?”

“Pawns.”

Nate lowered his head slightly and stared at him. “Explain that.”

“People naïve enough to be led by the nose and persuaded to cause trouble here locally. My job was to give them a cause and rile them up enough they would get violent. It’s not exactly a difficult thing to do. People have seen the inner circle of hell and are under severe mental stress. Probably three out of ten of those who survived the plague and its aftermath are basically nuts. Plant a seed of hate in their heads – this or that group caused all their problems – or the government did it – and they go out looking for someone to kill. It worked okay for Hitler.”

Tyrone broke in. “Are you saying the government has ordered you to artificially drum up antigovernment movements in the area? What the hell for?”

“More terrorist attacks,” the man answered. “It gives Washington an excuse to clamp down on people’s freedom. They’re just trying to protect you from the terrorists, don’t you know. And to do that, they need more control over your life. Our new president is power-hungry, and he needs an excuse to burn what’s left of the Constitution.” The man shook his head slightly. “And believe me, there’s very little of it left already. The guy used to be a corporate mogul – richer than six feet up a bull.” The man shrugged. “Now he’s president. Money’s no good anymore, so his new drug is power.”

Nate glared at him. “Didn’t you swear the same oath I did?”

“Hey, they feed us and provide my family with healthcare. I still have my wife and daughter. My son died in the plague. Survival: it’s the name of the game.”

Brian looked around. “I wonder if there’s some gas or kerosene around here. Some of your pawns burned my friend alive the other day. I think it’s eye for an eye time.”

The man pulled against his ropes. “I didn’t burn your friend.”

“You just admitted you put them up to it.” Brian spit his words out, burning with rage.

Nate broke in. “As long as he’s telling us what we need to know, we have no excuse to get barbaric.” He glared at the soldier. “But the minute he stops talking or starts telling us what we think are lies, we’ll light a welding torch and go to work.”

Brian took a rusty gallon can off a shelf. “Paint thinner. It’ll burn slower than gas. Take longer to kill him. He’ll scream longer that way.”

Deni’s head swiveled from Brian to Nate. She kept her concerns to herself, but it was obvious she was uncomfortable with the conversation.

Nate noticed her reaction but said nothing. “Why the hell are you using semis? And why are the terrorists who call themselves anarchists using semis?”

The soldier lifted both shoulders slightly. “The government’s short on resources the same as everyone else. There’s a big truck stop just north of the Florida-Georgia line and a few others between here and there. We just found some trucks that were still usable and filled the tanks. Then we made them available to the indigenous halfwits. We use them ourselves, mostly because military vehicles would be too obvious and they’re great for pushing stalled vehicles out of the road.”

“We saw two deuce and a halfs go by earlier.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“So the Army is using this road too?” Nate asked. “I mean besides you operators.”

The soldier shrugged again. “I guess so. They weren’t our trucks. We’ve been using the silly semis all along.”

It was growing colder in the metal building, and Tyrone zipped up his leather jacket. “What’s our new president’s name? I damn sure didn’t vote for him. What party is he in?”

The soldier looked as if he didn’t want to talk about it. “Russell Capinos. There is no political party anymore. The old pre-plague government’s gone. What we have now has no connection to the old government. It’s as different as the pre-plague America was to today’s America.”

“Russell Capinos,” Tyrone said. “Never heard of him.”

“All I know is he was some kind of a corporate big shot and one of the wealthiest assholes in the world before the plague. Now he’s residing in the White House and pulling the strings. Almost everyone in Congress is one of his cronies, put there by him. Same goes for almost every justice on the Supreme Court.” The soldier gave everyone a grim look. “Capinos has this country by the short hairs. He issues executive orders every day. It’s a Simon says government now, and he’s Simon. So far, what’s left of the high brass in the Pentagon has followed his orders as if he’s completely legit. It looks like they’ll continue to do so, for the present time anyway. They still refuse to go against the prime directive of staying subservient to civilian government.”

“Well, Washington and the Pentagon are both out of our hands.” Nate rubbed the stubble on his chin. “The question now is what to do with you. You’ve seen our faces. You’re a trained killer and part of a team of trained killers, all well equipped by our wonderful new government. It won’t take you long to learn who we are and almost everything about us, just by asking around. You admit you’re more than willing to follow orders from a corrupt government, even when those orders are unconstitutional, illegal, and immoral. I have a strong feeling if I let you go it’ll be the worst mistake of my life.”

The soldier looked away but said nothing. Finally, he turned his head and looked at Nate. “I’m not going to beg you not to kill me. I do ask that you treat me like a soldier and execute me with a bullet to the head rather than kill me slow.” He looked at Brian. “I’m sorry about your friend. But I didn’t burn anyone, and I didn’t tell anyone to burn anyone.”

“Well,” Brian said, “that makes it all okay then. I’ll go to his grave and tell him you didn’t really mean it.”

Mr. Broker entered through the side door. He hesitated for a moment before walking over to the others and entering the dim glow from the lantern. He seemed to be relieved when he saw that the soldier had not been beaten or injured in some horrible way. “Everybody knows you’re here now, so you can walk outside without getting shot if you want.”

“Good,” Nate said. “We’ll do just that.” He turned back to the others. “Atticus, will you watch our guest while the rest of us have a conversation outside?”

Atticus nodded. “Sure. If you hear my shotgun going off it’ll be him dying.”

Nate glared at their prisoner. “I know what you’re thinking. Yeah, he’s old, and you may be a high-speed operator, but you’re not that fast.” He checked the handcuffs and rope. “He’ll kill you. And you’ll have died for nothing.”

The soldier raised an eyebrow but remained silent. Nate was certain he had caught the true connotation of his last sentence: They still had not decided they were going to kill him, or at least Nate had not decided yet.

Standing outside the building in the dark with Deni, Tyrone, and Brian, Nate turned to them and asked, “Well, have we fallen so far that we’re willing to kill this man in cold blood?”

Deni didn’t hesitate. “My answer is no. I believe most of what he has told us. And I don’t think he directly killed anyone in this county.”

“But he put them up to it,” Brian protested, raising his voice higher than necessary. “What about Kendell?”

“I know how you feel.” Deni but her hand on Brian’s shoulder. “But the fact is those directly involved with that horrible crime are already dead. I doubt very seriously that this man actually put it in their mind to go out and burn a church with two teen boys in it and burn one of them alive.”

Tyrone spoke up. “I can’t pull the trigger myself. And I won’t be a part of consenting to anyone else doing it. The church killings were different. I would’ve done the same thing if I hadn’t gotten there after it was all over. But I do not want to live the rest of my life knowing I was part of executing a man who may be an asshole but didn’t really deserve to be killed.”

Before Nate gave his opinion, he asked Brian, “Do you think killing this man is the right thing to do?”

“Uh. I…” He exhaled forcefully. “No.”

Nate nodded his head slightly in the dark. “Okay then. The next question is what do we do with him?”

Brian let his rifle dangle across his chest from its sling and threw his hands up in the air in frustration. “Hell, if we aren’t going to kill him, we have to let him go. What else can we do with him?”

“Take him to Col. Donovan,” Nate answered. “It’ll get him off of our hands, and we can study Donovan’s reaction when we bring him in and ask him if he knows anything about the Army clearing a little two-lane country road of abandoned vehicles and using it every day to haul truckloads of stuff either to the little town of Glenwood or out of the town, heading north. I would also like to ask him, and watch his reaction closely when I do, about the covert operations our prisoner just told us about.”

“Yeah,” Tyrone muttered, rubbing his chin.

Deni said, “I trust Col. Donovan. But I don’t see anything wrong with your plan. We have to either let this guy go or give him to the Army, so giving him to Donovan sounds like a plan to me.”

Nate opened the door to the metal building, and a shaft of dim lantern light shot out from the opening. “Let’s go inside and tell Atticus and our guest what we have decided.”

~~~

Atticus pulled on his white beard and stared at the soldier. “You guys sure about this? If we let him go, we’re all going to have to leave town and go into hiding. Washington will not want us talking. The best way to shut us up is kill us.”

The soldier spoke up. “That won’t be necessary. I’ll tell them I didn’t see anyone’s face or hear anyone speak a name and have no idea who you are.”

Atticus snorted. “Yeah, like we can believe you. No. To be safe, we’ll have to leave town if we let this guy go.”

“And who is going to protect the townspeople?” Tyrone asked. “They need some kind of law. The Army will not stay long.”

“Sorry,” Atticus answered. “The fact is if we let him go we have to leave town and go into hiding. There ain’t no two ways about it. Someone else is going to have to step up and take over where you and friends left off.”

Tyrone rubbed the back of his neck and glared at the soldier. “That’s a hell of a price for the townspeople to pay. I wonder if this asshole’s worth it.”

The soldier pulled against his ropes, obviously growing more concerned about his fate. “All I have to do is tell them you wore masks at first and later kept me blindfolded. Blindfold me before you turn me in to the Army. They’ll get nothing out of me that could lead them to you.”

Deni collapsed onto a dirty old stool and stood her rifle on her knee. “Atticus is right. We can’t take any chances. If we let him go, we’ll all have to leave town immediately afterward. It’s that simple.”

Brian pointed at the soldier. “It’s his damn fault! Assholes like him are always forcing us to do things we don’t want to do. They back us against a wall and give us two choices: either we let them kill us, or we let them force us to become killers like they are. They’re turning us into animals. Every day, they force us to become more like them. Every day they steal a little more of our humani
ty.” He shouldered his rifle and aimed at the soldier. “Tyrone asked if he was worth it. No he’s not. He’s not. The people of that town will not have any protection other than the Army. And how long will they stay? How long before the Army leaves and they have no protection at all? Just because we don’t want to kill this one asshole. How many others will die so he can live?”

Nate rushed over and forced the muzzle of Brian’s rifle up. He knew Brian was just upset enough to pull the trigger.

Brian didn’t struggle. He let his father take the rifle from his hands. He just stood there with his head hanging low and his face dripping.

Nate pulled his son to him. “I know. I know. Go ahead. There’s no shame in it. I know it eats at you. It eats at me too. Watching you go through it is the worst.”

Deni held them both. “We’re going to let him go. It’s the right thing to do. Sometimes doing the right thing is expensive.”

Nate leaned Brian’s rifle against a toolbox. He searched around until he found a five-gallon bucket to sit on and carried it closer to the lantern so he could see. From a jacket pocket, he produced a folded map to study the back roads. He certainly wasn’t about to use the same road they had ambushed the soldiers on. No, he would find another route back to town. “Most of you guys might as well relax and get some rest. We’re going to stay here a few hours before heading back.”

Brian walked over and picked up his rifle. “I can watch him while everyone takes a nap. I promise I won’t kill him unless he gets loose.”

~~~

Nate managed to sleep two hours before they all scrambled into the truck and sheriff cruiser, thanking Sam for his help before opening the double doors and backing out of the metal building.

Tyrone took the soldier up on his idea of blindfolding him. He couldn’t possibly have seen much while lying in the back seat of the cruiser with Tyrone sitting on him in the dark, and Tyrone didn’t want him to see anything on the way into town and maybe bring trouble to the little community around the junkyard, not to mention Sam and his friends. Best he knew as little as possible about where he had been taken. Other than the cruiser getting stuck in a sandy Jeep trail, they had no trouble making it back to Glenwood.

At the Army base in town, Nate presented his prisoner to Col. Donovan and had him repeat what he told the others at the junkyard the night before. Donovan grew more angry as the soldier spoke, appearing to be struggling not to strike the man. “Do you have any idea how many people in the area have been killed and injured because of you? You son of a bitch!”

“You can always have him executed,” Brian commented dryly.

Deni nudged him with an elbow.

Donovan’s eyes flashed around his office, but it was obvious he was looking inside himself. “I’m serving a lunatic sham president, who was never really elected. I don’t know what his game is, but he damn sure doesn’t care about the American people.”

“And a Congress that was never really elected,” Atticus added. “I know of no one who has voted since before the plague. Last night was the first time I had even heard of this new President Capinos.”

Donovan glared at the Special Forces soldier. “Who’s your commanding officer?”

Still in Tyrone’s handcuffs, the soldier stood erect and looked straight ahead. “Sir, I respectfully refuse to answer any questions. If you contact the Pentagon and explain the situation, someone will come and get me. But it is very unlikely you will receive any answers to any of your questions.”

Nate raised an eyebrow and stared at him. “You answered our questions freely last night. We didn’t have to lay a hand on you.”

The soldier continued to look straight ahead and stand erect. “The threat was there. I knew you meant it when you said you would use torture if you had to. In the end, I would have talked anyway. No human being can stand up to torture. It would’ve been all for nothing. So I talked, and I told you the truth. Now I’m through talking. I doubt very seriously the colonel will allow any torture committed by anyone under his command. I know his reputation.”

Col. Donovan shrugged and sat down behind his desk. “You’re not my prisoner. You have been arrested by civilian authorities for the crimes of terrorism and accessory to murder, among many others. What makes you think you’re my prisoner?” Speaking to Nate and Tyrone, he said, “You can take him to your jail now. I expect there’ll be some kind of a trial, conviction, and execution. It’ll probably all be over by nightfall. Any of the townspeople serving on the jury is not likely to need any persuasion that the son of a bitch is guilty of the crimes he’s accused of. Bring his body back and I’ll see to it he gets a full military burial. Of course, we will not be able to notify his family, since he refuses to give us his name.”

Tyrone grabbed him with both hands and jerked him toward the door. “He’ll be dead in less than an hour.”

Brian added, “He should die the way Kendell did.”

The soldier’s eyes flashed to Brian and saw hate staring back. “Okay, Colonel, I’ll answer your questions. It’s all bullshit anyway. America died along with most of the population. What’s left is just crazy bullshit, from the White House on down to the local fake sheriff. It’s not like I’m betraying my country. There is no America anymore.”

Nate helped Tyrone sit him down in front of Donovan’s desk. “I don’t think we’re America’s enemy, so how could you be betraying the country?”

The soldier leaned forward in his chair to avoid pressing against the cuffs and cutting off circulation to his hands. “First Sergeant Henry Kramer.”

Donovan pressed the start button on a recorder sitting on his desk. “Okay Top, who is your CO?”

Thirty minutes later, Donovan stopped the recorder. “You will be held until I receive orders from my superiors.” He called in soldiers standing outside his office to take Sergeant Kramer away.

“Now what?” Nate asked. “You’re between a rock and a hard place. Where are your allegiances going to be? The people or a fake government in Washington?”

Donovan swallowed. “I have no idea what I’m going to do.”

“Do you know anything about the military trucks we saw heading south?” Nate asked. “Our prisoner said they aren’t his outfit’s trucks. He claims they’ve been using the semis all along.”

Donovan leaned back in his chair. “The Army has cleared a shortcut from town to the interstate. Starting four days ago, we’ve had an open route all the way to the Georgia line. I managed to get some of that wild hog meat shipped north in refrigerated trailers using the cleared roads. Supplies for the base arrived last night in fact. They must’ve been the trucks you saw.”

Nate decided to let it go for the time being. “Well,” he said, “it’s been a long time since any of us had any sleep. We’re going to find a place to crash and get some rest.”

Donovan seemed to be lost in his own thoughts. “Yeah, you do that.” For some reason, he stood and shook Nate’s hand.

It was then that Nate realized Donovan knew he and the others were leaving town.

“Good luck to you.” Donovan looked at the others. “Good luck to all of you.”

Deni looked sick. “I’m sorry we caused all of this.”

Donovan shook his head. “Don’t. You did the right thing. Never be sorry for that. Now I have to finish it.”

They filed out of the office in silence, looking like they had just lost a friend.

In the parking lot, Deni leaned against the truck and folded her arms. “I think we just said good-bye to Col. Donovan.”

Nate said, “Yes we did.”

“What’s he going to do now?” Brian asked.

“I’m not sure,” Nate answered truthfully. “Whatever he does, he’s powerless to stop those in Washington or the Pentagon. He’s just a colonel and follows orders. He’s not much different from our friend Sergeant Kramer.”

Deni looked in the direction of Donovan’s office, a collection of metal storage buildings, reinforced with sandbags. “We may have just handed Colonel Donovan a death sentence. Either way, his career is over. His life is over.” She looked up at the sky. “Damn it. We should’ve just killed the bastard.”