Crystal asked, “You want to know what Jack thinks of you now, Fletch?”
“No.”
“He thinks you’re senile.” Crystal laughed. “He says you forget all the stories I tell about you.”
Fletch looked sharply at the curtain. “You couldn’t know that, Crystal, unless he’s talked to you, recently.”
“He called this morning. From Camp Orania.”
“He took a chance telephoning from there, didn’t he? And how come he can get through on the phone to you and we couldn’t?”
“He’s my son. He knows the appropriate password. And you don’t.”
“You could have saved a hell of a lot of bother.”
I’m hungry!
“Jack says he’s doing very well. He’s videotaped the camp and everyone in it. He spent the night copying all of the files out of The Tribe’s computer system, files from around the country and around the world. This afternoon, he was to
attend some kind of a planning meeting. That must have been interesting.”
“He told you about making everybody puke while Kriegel was speaking?”
“Oh, yes.” Crystal laughed. “Shades of his father.”
Fletch did not ask if Jack had told his mother that the night before he had killed a man, to save the lives of Carrie and Fletch.
“Stop selling him to me,” Fletch said. “I’ve got the point.”
“Last night he even discovered a list of people targeted for assassination by The Tribe. Guess what.”
“What?”
“Your name’s on it.”
Fletch thought. “I suppose it would be.”
“Irwin Maurice Fletcher.”
Fletch sat forward in the oversized chair. “Those sons of bitches know Jack’s my kid.”
“Do they?”
“He’s in danger!” Fletch jumped up. “I put him in danger! Shit! End of story! To hell with Blythe Spirit! Goodbye.”
Fletch left Crystal’s room.
I
N A MOMENT
, he returned. He leaned against the doorjamb. “Crystal, what are you doing here?”
“Slimming,” she said.
“Jack tells me you’ve been coming here twice a year for years. And you’re still slimming?”
“This time they’re recommending I stay here, maybe, for good.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m sick, Fletch. I’ve got a problem.”
“You realize you referred to your being
incommunicado
here at Blythe Spirit as your ‘ultimate line of defense’?”
“Okay. I did. So what?”
“Ultimate line of defense against what? Me? Jack? Living? Why do you need it?”
“You know all about addictions now? You got a better idea?”
“Always.”
“Tell me.”
“First: trust us.”
“Whatever that means.”
“Second: lower the food thermostat in your head.”
“Oh, Fletch. What do you know?”
“I know I’ll be back.”
“
T
ime to go
, “Fletch said quietly. “Time to get you out of here.”
“Uh?” Jack’s head raised from the pillow. He looked at Fletch in the door. He sat up on the cot and swung his feet onto the floor. “I’m ready to go.”
For a long moment Fletch had stood in the door of the little office in the log cabin headquarters at Camp Orania looking at his son. Jack was asleep on the cot against the wall. The room was lit only by the desk light. Dressed in shorts, T-shirt, socks, and sneakers, Jack was sprawled on the cot, his face squished on the pillow. He slept soundly. His hair was tousled. To Fletch he looked so young. Fletch wondered how his son had looked when even younger, as a boy, a child, a baby, asleep, awaking, awake, playing, listening, laughing, crying, happy, angry, bored. Standing in the door just watching his son sleep, Fletch realized something of how much he had missed.
It was dawn, Monday.
Sitting on the edge of the cot, Jack shook his head. “I was wondering how I was going to get out of here.”
Fletch said, “There is a thick fog.”
Fletch had had to fly from Chicago back to Nashville through Atlanta at that hour of the night. He had left his car at the Nashville airport.
He had eaten three sandwich suppers since leaving Blythe Spirit.
In the fog the drive from Nashville to Tolliver, Alabama, had been slow. Even though Route I-65 was a good, clear highway, he had not dared drive faster than the speed which would allow him to stop safely within half the distance of his visibility.
Finding the entrance to the timber road into Camp Orania proved a challenge. In the fog he went by it three times before finally spotting the sentry box a few meters down the road.
He stopped at the sentry box, prepared to say, “Code name: Siegfried.” No one came out of the box to challenge him.
Once in the main area of the encampment he parked the station wagon in the woods, facing outward, toward the main road.
The only light was in the front right room of the headquarters log cabin. He crept onto the porch, through the screened door quietly, and pushed open the door to the office.
Fletch asked, “Were you waiting for me?”
Jack said, “I don’t know.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
Dawn light was penetrating the fog.
From somewhere in the camp there was the sound of one
man, alone, roaring with what might have been laughter. It was a high sound, sporadic. It sounded nervous, uncertain, crazed.
Fletch said, “I guess Leary is up.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “He’s been mixing coke and booze and God knows what else.”
“Not what he needs.”
“Not what anybody needs.”
Jack took a plastic shopping bag from the kneehole of the desk. In it were computer disks, audio and videotapes.
From outside, closer, Leary roared with insane laughter. It was the same laughter he had uttered just before he had smashed his forehead against another man’s.
Then there came the rapid fire of not one but two semiautomatic weapons.
Fletch glanced through the window.
Leary was standing near the flagpole. He had a semiautomatic weapon in each hand. He was firing both weapons in a full circle around the camp.
He was yelling, “Get ‘em! Get ‘em, guys! They’re everywhere. Get ‘em now!”
As Fletch saw Leary pivoting to face the cabin, he ducked. “Down, Jack! Get down!”
“What’s happening?”
“Leary’s shooting up the camp!”
“Has he gone crazy?”
Shells came through the window glass. The desk lamp shattered.
Fletch sprawled on the floor.
There was the sound of other firing, a lot of it. Men were yelling on all sides of the camp.
Jack reached up to the desk and grabbed the camcorder.
“‘Paranoids are their own worst enemies,’” he quoted.
He crawled through the door of the office to the cabin’s front screen door.
“Wait a minute,” Fletch said.
“No, no.”
“Jack!”
Jack pushed open the base of the screen door. He continued crawling on his stomach out onto the porch.
“Jack, no!”
Fletch crawled after him. He grabbed Jack’s leg.
Jack pulled his leg free of Fletch’s grip.
Fletch saw that on the muscle at the top of the calf of Jack’s left leg was a tattoo of a small, wide-opened blue eye. It was complete with lashes. It stared behind Jack.
Fletch had not noticed the blue-eye tattoo on his son’s leg before.
He laughed.
The screen door closed behind Jack.
Fletch remained on the floor inside the screen door. He was not much safer than Jack was.
Through the door Fletch could see the figures with their weapons standing on all sides of the camp in the fog. They could have been anybody, friends to each other or foes.
They came out from cover while still pulling on their pants, stamping their feet into boots.
They were shooting around the hills above them.
They were shooting around the camp.
They were shooting each other.
At the base of the flagpole, Leary was dead meat.
In the fog the figures with their spewing weapons took on the postures, the poses of comic book characters, cartoons.
They stood bravely, stupidly in the open, feet separated, knees a little bent, shoulders low. They fired their weapons from their waists. They sprayed bullets every which way. They shot at every noise they heard, at every figure they saw, at anything that moved.
Hit by fire, they even fell like comic book characters, some rising up and sitting down hard, then rolling on the ground to accept death. Some flung their arms up dramatically, then dropped their weapons before falling themselves.
To Fletch, these men seemed to rush to their deaths, savor it. They did little or nothing to protect themselves.
On his belly on the porch, Jack was taping it all.
In the increasing light, few now were firing toward the cabin headquarters.
“God! The stupid bastards!” Wolfe was on the floor beside Fletch, looking through the bottom of the screen. “Jesus! These goddamned fools! I hate them! Look at what they’re doing to each other! How many are dead so far?”
Fletch said, “About twenty.”
Kriegel, his girth dressed only in a towel, stepped between Fletch and Wolfe. He pushed open the screen door.
On the porch, Kriegel raised his arms. He yelled, “Stop firing!”
“Were we attacked?” Wolfe asked Fletch.
“Yeah. By Leary.”
“Leary! Why?”
“Guess he got a snootful.”
Tracy was on the floor beside Commandant Wolfe. Blood had drained from the boy’s face.
“Stop shooting!” Kriegel shouted. “Stop! Stop!”
Arms still raised, Kriegel stepped off the porch. Yelling as
loud as he could in all directions, he began to cross the encampment toward the flagpole. “Stop! Stop, listen to me! Stop shooting, you damned swine!”
Five meters from the cabin, Kriegel was shot in his right leg. He spun around with the shot.
Holding his bleeding leg in his hand, he continued across the encampment.
Within another couple of meters he was hit in the chest and face.
That time when he spun, he fell to the ground and stayed there.
“Jesus!” Wolfe said. “These guys! These stupid, damned …”
The firing continued for some minutes.
The encampment was littered with bodies. A few still writhed. Except for the pain and the crying these few were as good as dead.
Then there was a long moment of silence.
On the porch, Jack was checking his camcorder.
Wolfe stood up and went through the screen door.
Tracy followed Fletch onto the porch.
Hands in the back pockets of his uniform pants, Wolfe stood at the top of the steps and surveyed the carnage.
Fletch asked Jack, “Did you get it all?”
“Yeah.”
“Even through the fog?”
“Oh, yeah. This has an 8:1 focus.”
“You could see them better than they could see each other.”
Jack left the porch.
He moved around the camp, videotaping every corpse.
Fletch asked Wolfe, “Do you suppose there are any we can try to save?”
Wolfe said: “Who gives a shit?”
From the direction of the trailers where the women and girl children lived, they came and stood together in a wide-eyed, unmoving, silent group. They came so far and no farther.
Jack came back toward the porch.
“How many dead?” Fletch asked him.
“Thirty-six. Two still suffering. Those two are beyond help.”
“How many were in the camp?” Fletch asked Wolfe.
“Forty-one.”
“I guess a few slept late.”
Wolfe said, “They’re under their beds. Bastards. All of ‘em. There was nothing I could do with them. Such fools, useless, dumb fools.”
Fletch held Jack’s shopping bag of disks and tapes. “Let’s go,” he said to his son.
Jack dashed into the log cabin. He came out carrying the guitar by its neck.
Wolfe asked, “Where? Where are you going?”
Fletch shrugged. “Out into that big, scary world out there, I guess.”
At the sound of the whimpering, Fletch turned back to survey the encampment.
Like a sniffing puppy, Tracy, in his uniform, was darting from one dead body to another, looking at each for a moment, wringing his hands, making this most pitiful noise of distress, fright, shock.
On the porch, Wolfe drew his pistol from his holster. He waved it vaguely in the air.
For a moment, Fletch was unsure whether it was Wolfe’s idea to shoot at Jack and Fletch, or to shoot himself.
While Fletch watched, Wolfe slumped down onto a camp
chair. He lowered his head. He held his pistol between his knees.
Yellow sunlight was breaking through the fog.
Wolfe’s hair turned brassy in that sunlight.
The dead bodies strewn on the ground began to cast shadows.
T
here were still
patches of fog in the low places but for the most part Fletch drove Jack through a dazzling sunny morning toward Huntsville Airport.
It was hard for each of them to assimilate what he had heard, seen, experienced, felt in a foggy encampment surrounded by woods just minutes before.
As Fletch turned onto the road away from the encampment, Jack had asked: “We’re not reporting this?”
“That’s the point, isn’t it? To report it?”
“I mean now.” Jack glanced at the cellular phone on the car seat next to Fletch. “To the cops or something.”
“You said there was no need for medical attention. Right?”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Those who were dying are dead. Those weapons don’t leave many survivors.”
“You’ll need time to do the story. Wolfe can report the mess. If he will. Let’s not blow the story.”
“I’ve heard that about you. You once reported a murder
to your editor and asked him to tell the photographers to give the widow time to get home to report the murder.”
“Did I?”
“You just said I’ve got a story here.” Jack patted the plastic shopping bag on his lap.
“Oh, sure. And you think it’s a little hotter, more immediate than a master’s thesis?”
“Well, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never read a master’s thesis, let alone written one.”
“For whom am I doing this story?”
“You mean, for which news organization?”
“Yeah.”