Authors: James W. Hall
The video flickered and ended.
Everyone was silent for a moment. Caitlin moaned to herself and stepped away from the others.
“I thought we were here for the hogs,” Flynn said.
“We were,” Cassandra said. “But this trumps the hogs.”
“Sure,” Flynn said. “Maybe this could shut Dobbins down, send him to jail, but even if it did, it’s a one-off. It doesn’t do anything for the big picture. That shot of Burkhart killing the sick pig, that’s the stuff we’re after, animal cruelty, not some pissant drug operation. That just muddies our message.”
“Dobbins is a big deal. Take him down, it’s a blow to his corporate bosses, a blow to the industry.”
“They’ll say Dobbins was an outlier. Throw him under the bus. Their hands stay clean.”
“How do we know that?” Cassandra said. “Maybe Pastureland is fully aware of what’s happening at one of their farms and they condone this. Maybe they’re even getting a cut.”
“They make billions on pork. Why risk a sideline in dope?”
Jellyroll raised his hand like a kid in class. Cassandra nodded his way.
“If I’m going to post the video to YouTube, we need to drive over to Goldsboro to hijack a wireless signal.”
“Use your damn smartphone,” Billy Jack said. “Post it tonight.”
“File’s too large. Need a wireless connection. That motel we stayed at last week, we could get a room, take showers, upload the video, then blow this taco stand.”
Billy Jack was all in for that. Scrub off the putrid hog stink.
“You deleted the video from the watch, right, Jelly? Before Caitlin gave it back to Javier?”
“I did.”
“So even if they have the watch, they don’t know what we’ve got.”
“Big deal,” Caitlin said. “They know we’ve been spying. They’re bound to think the worst. They’ll come for us. I know they will. We’re finished.”
“Once it’s on YouTube,” Jellyroll said, “we send a link to the authorities. Maybe use Flynn’s FBI contact. Someone like that.”
“Your buddy Agent Sheffield will handle it, right? If you ask him nice.” Cassandra was smiling, giving Flynn some shit.
“He’s not my goddamn buddy.”
“Okay, your father’s buddy.” Cassandra and Thorn had crossed paths last year. Sparks flew, but not the romantic kind.
Flynn Moss was the product of a one-night stand between Thorn and April Moss, Flynn’s mom, a fact both father and son discovered by accident a year ago. Flynn had grown up without a father and had no interest in having one now, especially this guy. A hard-core loner, Thorn lived in a primitive cracker house along the coast in Key Largo and tied custom bonefish flies for a living. The guy came across as mellow, living the laid-back life, but puncture the veneer, piss him off, endanger his friends, and molten lava spewed. The guy could flare so hot it was scary. Flynn had to admit he admired that. The lava part. A year after their first meeting, Flynn still didn’t want or need a dad, but damn it, he wished he’d inherited more of Thorn’s latent ferocity.
Jellyroll said, “I’m going to post on the message board. Not a mayday or anything, just let our associates know where we are, the broad outline, you know, in case some bad shit happens and we go dark.”
“All right, that’s it, goddamn it, I’m leaving,” Caitlin said. “I’m packing my gear and taking my canoe.”
“Happy paddling.” Billy Jack shot her a grin. “Watch out for white-eyed rednecks strumming banjos.”
Cassandra walked over to Caitlin, took hold of her shoulder, swept back her hair, and leaned in close. Cheek to cheek, Cassandra spoke for half a minute while the others watched. Caitlin’s panicked expression slowly dissolved, she nodded, then her head sagged and she looked up at Cassandra.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “One more night.”
“We’re tired, we’re spooked,” Cassandra said, facing the group. “A lot’s been going on. But I don’t think we have anything to fear from these yahoos. We’ve heard their kind of bluster before. Let’s just absorb this news, get some rest; tomorrow we’ll consider our options, figure out the best way to help Javier. He’s been loyal. We can’t just leave him and Jésus hanging.”
“Fuck ’em,” Billy Jack said. “They got paid. They knew the risks.”
Flynn had first watch. He sat cross-legged with his back against a pine. He’d chosen a spot fifty yards from their campsite on the north bank of the Neuse River.
That Monday before Thanksgiving, the night was crisp and a bright full moon dusted the branches with a silvery powder, enough radiance for him to keep watch on the narrow trail that led to their campsite. Only that one way in. These woods were too snarled with thickets and vines for anyone to sneak up on the camp from another direction.
Cassandra and Caitlin were in their sleeping bags, stretched out side by side on beds of pine straw, Billy Jack and Jellyroll in the hammocks they’d rigged inside the group’s Ford van.
Flynn was armed only with a whistle. If he heard anyone approaching, he’d blow it twice, a signal for the group to abandon their sleeping bags, grab their escape kits, and sprint the half mile along the bank of the Neuse to the sandy shoreline where they’d hidden their canoes. Flynn would take a different route to the same location. On previous operations they’d drilled for this contingency, joking at what seemed like a senseless precaution. But when they reviewed it a while ago, there was no laughter.
Running from danger was their only option. Weeks ago they’d voted to outlaw weapons, and they’d tossed the group’s single handgun in a river in Marsh Fork, Kentucky. Cassandra wasn’t happy about parting with her .38, but the group had spoken. Four to one against her. Having guns led to laziness and lack of ingenuity. If they couldn’t resolve their conflicts peacefully, what good was their entire mission? Guns were antithetical to all they espoused.
Above him a breeze stirred the limbs. Flynn lifted his head and listened to them rustle, tried to make out any human sounds the wind might be concealing. Around him the strawberry scent of evergreen was banished and overwhelmed by the harsh reek of hog manure. The stench of it had given Jellyroll and Caitlin headaches all week. Their eyes reddened and Caitlin’s throat was raw. But their suffering was nothing compared to those in the communities living downwind of the farm. It’s why they’d come. To give voice to the voiceless, stand against the powerful.
Most of all they were here to mobilize the locals and bring attention to the outrageous crimes committed against them. Only they hadn’t counted on unearthing something like this. Their discovery had been unintentional but they saw immediately how volatile their information was.
It was well after midnight. Flynn was in the middle of a reverie about Thorn’s oceanside house in Key Largo, surrounded by dazzling blue waters that teemed with manatees, brightly colored reef fish, and rolling tarpon, and the sky above it thick with pelicans and ospreys and roseate spoonbills, a gorgeous, Technicolor, heart-soaring vision.
When the intruders came, the rustle of the dried leaves jerked him alert and Flynn barely stifled a panicky yelp.
After he steadied himself, he leaned out for a glimpse.
Twenty feet away, out on the dirt track, the point man was carrying an automatic weapon and crouching low. The man flanking him held a shotgun. The man in the lead wore night-vision goggles, training them forward as he moved toward the campsite.
Silently, Flynn came to his feet, pressing his back to the pine. He raised the whistle to his lips. If he blew it now with the men so near, there’d be no escape for him. If he waited till they passed, the others wouldn’t have time to get away.
Shit. He’d set up the watch post too close to camp. He saw that now. Stupid mistake. Should have realized it long ago and moved farther up the trail.
Halting, the point man seemed to sense a presence nearby. In the moonlight Flynn saw the snowy bristles of his flat-top. A guy in his sixties, Burkhart was his name, the duly elected sheriff of Winston County and head of security at Dobbins hog farm. A cold-eyed guy with a military bearing, he’d confronted Cassandra in town a few days ago. Reached out a big hand and trickled his fingers across her cheek. Drawling with mock courtesy, a threat masked in avuncular concern. It might be better if she and her friends stopped stirring up trouble and got their sweet asses out of town and didn’t return. This, he told her, will be your one and only warning. You’re a grown lady, so you’ll have to decide, but he’d hate to see any harm come to such a sweetheart.
When Cassandra knocked his hand away, the man laughed, calling her a spitfire, and grinned into her eyes as though they’d forged an intimate bond.
Flynn moved behind the tree, squatted down and patted a hand across the ground. He risked another peek around the trunk. Both men had halted. They’d begun to scan the area, panning their weapons in a slow circle.
On the ground a few feet away Flynn found a rock—something from his storehouse of Hollywood clichés. Toss it into the nearby brush, misdirect the bad guys, and while their heads were turned, make a run. Most of the clichés Flynn had absorbed from his thousands of hours of film study were bogus, never worked off screen, but he hoped, by god, this one might.
He stepped back from the pine, keeping the trunk in the attackers’ sight line, and he hurled the rock over their heads back into the woods behind them. It clattered into leaves and fallen brush. The man behind Burkhart swung around, tracking the noise, taking a step or two away from Flynn’s hiding place, but Burkhart wasn’t fooled. One-handed he adjusted his goggles and began a slow sweep of his weapon in Flynn’s direction.
Flynn ducked back behind the tree. His chest so constricted, he couldn’t draw a breath. The man hissed to his partner and Flynn heard the dry crackle of their steps fanning out around him.
Flynn brought the whistle to his lips and blew two sharp blasts. He blew twice more as he was sprinting away, the automatic fire shredding the trees around him, strafing the branches, spurting the dirt at his feet. The deafening bursts of gunfire made any more warnings unnecessary, but Flynn blew the whistle twice more as he raced through the darkness, leading the men deeper into the pine forest that smelled so lovely.
If his friends had followed their evacuation plan and fled into the darkness on foot, heading down the bank to the canoes, everything might have worked out differently. But they panicked, or Cassandra overruled them and herded them into the van, unwilling to abandon their vehicle and gear. He heard the van’s engine cough and fail to catch, then turn over again. The damn starter motor had been cranky for weeks, but they were short on cash and hadn’t replaced it. He heard one attacker change direction, rushing toward the campsite, and he heard the engine sputter to life, then the bark of gunfire, howls of rage, and even louder howls of agony.
Flynn veered toward the camp, sprinting low. He didn’t know what he could do to help the others, but he had to try.
All around him the pine forest was thick with scent. It was that rich odor he was thinking of, the sappy sweetness of evergreen, when he felt the hard electric tug on his shoulder, then another in his leg, and a second later a stinging spray of buckshot, then a creamy warmth spreading down his back.
After a breathless moment, he felt a surge of unexpected joy, a release from the tension of these last few days, these last months, an exhilarating letting go, and for the next hundred yards as the mindless bullets ripped apart the air around him, Flynn Moss seemed to float above the rough terrain, fearless and strong, his feet barely grazing the earth as he saw the moonlit water up ahead, the silver current that streamed through this fertile countryside, flowing and flowing, as all rivers did, their waters inevitably returning to the welcoming sea.
TWO
A WEEK AFTER THANKSGIVING, AN
early afternoon in December, Thorn sat at a computer console in the Key Largo library, once again searching for news of his son, Flynn Moss.
He’d propped Flynn’s latest postcard against the base of the monitor and was scanning the rows of photographs Google search had selected for him when he typed in the words “Marsh Fork, Kentucky.” None of the images on the computer matched the green hills and lazy blue sky of the postcard.
On his screen there were maps of the area, placing Marsh Fork in the eastern end of the state near the West Virginia line, and there were images of miners with coal-smudged faces and hard hats standing shoulder to shoulder and staring into the camera with a resigned weariness. And photos of Marsh Fork Elementary School, a one-story, tired-out brick building surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. But most of the photos featured protest rallies inside gymnasiums or in green rolling fields or in front of Marsh Fork Elementary.
The protestors held up hand-lettered signs demanding the governor save their kids, save their elementary school, save their community, save their mountains. A few rows down from all the protest pictures were some images taken from a mile or so in the air that showed a lush green mountain range pockmarked with the gray flattened scars of mountaintop removal, a mining technique that wiped out the forests and blasted away the rivers and streams and obliterated the mountains one by one as giant cranes scooped out the black shiny coal.
There were aerial shots that included both the elementary school and a huge pond carved into the mountains just a half mile above the school. A caption described the pond as filled with three billion gallons of coal slurry. Thorn had to look that one up and found that coal slurry was the by-product of mountaintop removal mining. A highly toxic blend of dissolved minerals. The Web page that listed the toxins in a typical slurry pond was full of multisyllable chemicals from benzidine to dimethyl phthalate. Thorn didn’t need to look up any of those. The images of the foul brown liquid made it obvious.
Nobody sane would want their kids attending school in that brick building a half mile downhill from a few billion gallons of toxic sludge held in place by earthen walls.
A few weeks ago when Flynn sent this postcard, this is where he’d been, Flynn and his cohorts in the Earth Liberation Front, the group of eco-avengers he’d gotten mixed up with late last year. The postcards had been arriving regularly at Sugarman’s office. Sugar, Thorn’s closest friend, ran a one-man private investigation agency and because of that, Thorn usually deferred to him in matters of logic, but since these postcards started arriving, he and Sugar had been at odds over what they signified.