Fourth Quadrant: The Wyoming Chronicles: Book Two, page 17
Another bullet was followed by a distant gunshot.
“Will the shooters try you again after dark?”
“Might,” Edmund told her. “That’s when we spread out. Use the night-vision gear. It’s a whole lot safer. We can see them, but they can’t see us.”
“Yeah,” Tully said sourly. “And that’s when you can see the kids, hear them begging. I hate this shit. I mean, what are we doing? They’re Americans, too, aren’t they?”
Lauren gave him a shrug. “Is anyone an American now? Or are we Nebraskans, Coloradoans, and Wyomingites? It’s like saying German, French, and Dutch. State identities have replaced national identity.”
“Dear God, I hope not,” Tully said.
Fanta gestured with his chin. “Well, the shooting’s over for now. They’re headed back south. None of those people left home expecting to fight a war. They took their guns for self-protection. Maybe to shoot a deer or some farmer’s cow to keep their bellies full. It’s not like some sexy babe on a bike is going to show up like a miracle with a couple hundred rounds of 5.56 ammo.” He gave her a suggestive wink.
“Bet you say that to all the girls who show up out here.” She laughed for the first time in days.
“Hell,” Fanta told her, “after looking at Muirhead for the last week, I was starting to think he looked like Kim Kardashian.”
She laughed again, hard. Then harder. As if some dam had burst inside her. She laughed until her stomach hurt, and every person in the foxhole was howling with her.
Foxhole laughter. That’s what Tyrell called it. The crazy mirth of soldiers under unbearable stress. He said it was the only medicine for madness.
“All right,” Edmund said when the amusement started to die down. “Enough fun for one day. Back to business. Tully, clean up those empty MRE packets. Don’t want people tripping over ’em next time we’re hit.”
“Yes, sir.”
As Tully gathered up the trash, Lauren leaned back against the dirt and smiled. She was becoming one of them. A soldier, of sorts.
Was that her path? To be a soldier? Right after she’d fallen in love with Tyrell, she’d considered enlisting in the army, but decided against it. She’d really wanted to finish college.
But now?
Somehow, serving alongside these people on The Line felt more meaningful. Life had purpose when you were fighting to protect the other soldiers in your foxhole—and fighting to protect the people of your state or country who could not protect themselves. The sick, the elderly, the children. Someone had to fight for them.
Lauren could do that. Couldn’t she?
CHAPTER THIRTY
The smoke had been tough that day. Dark, obscuring the sun; like a bloody red orb it rose high in the sky. And the air stank. The “burning garbage” smell, as it was referred to, had an acrid sear that hurt the nose and burned the back of the throat.
Wearing an N95 mask cut the worst of the burning sensation. As did her helmet when she rode with her visor down.
Talk around the Guard warehouse centered on whether this was smoke from a burning Salt Lake City, or if it had come from farther
West. Maybe San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle. The great California forest fires of the early 2020s had proved just how far a thick smudge could crawl across the sky.
After Lauren made it back to the hotel, she chained the Kaytoom to its light pole, took a quick shower, and donned her jeans and white cotton shirt, thankful to be rid of the stench.
She grabbed up the boogie bag and trotted down the stairs to the bar, entering with a weary swagger. Only to find someone sitting in her booth. Seeing the top of the woman’s head over the back of the booth, Lauren stopped short, shot a “what the hell” glance Lucy’s way.
The barmaid raised an eyebrow, then tilted her head toward the booth in a “You’d better go see” gesture.
Lauren rocked her jaw and started forward, stepping up next to the booth and staring down into Breeze Tappan’s tanned face. Her old friend had both hands clasped around a half-empty glass of stout. That old familiar Tappan glare was still the same. Breeze’s dark-brown irises blending to tawny-centers that gave way to hard black pupils. The tanned lines of her face seemed to blend with her dark-brown hair. A hardness lay in the set of her lips and jaw.
She wore a blue-denim, short-sleeved shirt that exposed tanned and muscular forearms. Slim Levi’s clung to her legs. A 9 mm 230 SIG Sauer rode in the holster at her hip.
“Hey, Lauren.”
“Breeze.” Lauren’s gut twisted itself into a double knot. “What are you doing here?”
“Take a seat.” Breeze gestured with a long-fingered hand.
Seeing the familiar pattern of scars left by ranch work sent a shiver down Lauren’s back.
Breeze told her, “That barmaid, Lucy? She’s got your back. I had to swear on a stack of Bibles that I was your friend before she’d let me sit here.”
“Yeah, well, Lucy’s got a really low bar when it comes to this booth. That’s why she lets me use it.”
Lauren tossed the boogie bag in next to the wall and slid in beside to it. On the edge of the seat. In case she had to run for it. “So...like, how are you?”
“Fucked. How about you?” Breeze’s lips quivered, tried to make a smile, and failed.
“’Bout the same, I guess.” Lauren couldn’t figure out what to do with her hands; they kept knotting and rubbing together like nervous rodents. She could have kissed Lucy when she set a cold glass of stout in front of her. Lauren took a sip, thankful for the rich taste on her suddenly too-dry mouth.
“Saw Mike today.” Breeze lowered her gaze to where she tapped slim fingers on the table. “Said we needed to talk. Said you’re going to get yourself killed. That you think I hate you.”
“How’s he doing? I haven’t been by in a couple of days. They’ve had me busy.”
Breeze fiddled with her glass. “Me, too. Figured we’d run into each other in the FOB. Can you believe? The Port of Entry’s now a forward operating base? Where the hell did that come from?”
“It’s military. Tyrell always talked about the FOB, how it was sort of the center of their world. He, um...” The words just faded away. She was staring into Breeze’s eyes, heart beginning to pound.
“Must be a hell of a guy.” Breeze tried to smile. Couldn’t quite pull it off.
“Yeah. You seeing anybody? I mean, before all this...”
“Nope.” Breeze paused, her brow lining slightly. “Something about the guys at University of Denver. Then the investment firm I was working in. I don’t know. It’s something about how they’ve never had dirt or blood under their fingernails. You know what I mean?”
Was that why she’d taken to Tyrell with such a passion? Because he didn’t define himself by whether or not his team won on Sunday night football? By the kind of car he drove? Or because he could work out for forty minutes in the gym?
At the silence, Lauren asked, “How’d you get out of Colorado?”
Breeze had a haunted look. “Back roads through the mountains. Four of us started. On bikes. I’m the only one who made it as far as Woods Landing. Got lucky. The Militia at the checkpoint let me pass. Might have gotten nasty but there were two women with them. And it turned out I knew more about Wyoming history than they did. Can you believe they were raised in Rawlins and don’t know who Big Nose George Parrott was?”
“Well...it’s been a while since anybody in Rawlins has hung an outlaw from a lamp post on Spruce Street and then buried his body in a barrel in their back yard.” Lauren paused. “And, as I remember, the governor of Wyoming wore a pair of shoes made from a chunk of hide he skinned off of old George and tanned.”
Breeze nodded. “Sort of makes you think Rawlins isn’t quite the same fun and rollicking-good-times-not-to-mention-jolly place that it was in the 1880s, doesn’t it?”
“Change is the only constant.” Lauren sipped her stout. “Heard you saw Tiffany.”
“Yeah. Right after I crossed the line.” Breeze was running her fingers along the sides of her stout. “She told me Mike was in charge of feeding Buffalo Camp. I kind of fell into the line rider thing. Didn’t have anything else to do.”
“What about the ranch?”
Breeze looked around at the fancy bar. “When I got accepted to University of Denver, I figured I’d never set foot in Wyoming again. Unless it was to attend the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium. You know, for when the chairman of the Fed called me over for advice. Or maybe to go skiing at Teton Village after I made my first million.”
“How’s that going?”
“Pretty shitty. You?”
“’Bout the same.”
Breeze gestured around. “Yet, here I sit. In a bar in Wyoming. Where I never thought I’d be.” She shook her head. “When all of this broke, I was in the middle of a business lunch at a swanky place in south Denver. Shit just got worse by the day. And as it did, all I could think about was getting home. Back here.”
Breeze paused, frowned. “I waited too fucking long, Lauren. Should have left that weekend. By the time we pulled out, it was all we could do to get the bikes past the wreckage in the roads.”
“What about the roadblocks?”
“Took 40 to Granby. Took two days before Felix and I could trade for another tank of gas for his bike. Cost him a gold Rolex. But it only got him as far as a roadblock on top of Willow Creek Pass.”
“The Jackson County deputies? They shook us down for seventy-five bucks.”
Breeze met her stare with dead eyes. “If there were ever any Jackson County deputies they were either fled or long-dead. No, this was an ambush. It... Damn it, they shot Felix for his bike. Would have taken me for the fucking, but I shot ’em, Lauren. Had a pistol.”
“Yeah,” Lauren whispered, Masterson’s face hanging behind her eyes. “You still see them? Like, some part of them got sucked inside? Maybe like you inhaled their souls and can’t get rid of them?”
Breeze was watching her with that hard-eyed Tappan stare. “I guess I... No, damn it. Not really. I mean, they’d set themselves up on top of that pass. Felix and I weren’t the first. The ditch on the downhill side? It was full of bodies, Lauren. Men, women, children. Only...the women were naked. And behind the roadblock? Twenty vehicles. Their cache.”
Breeze looked away. “It should bother me, Lauren. Only it doesn’t. Maybe I’m soulless. Hell, I felt worse when I was a kid and shot coyotes that were killing the sheep.” She swallowed hard. “And then came the I-25 checkpoint. And women and children. And now I know I’m a monster. Because I just shot them down. That machine gun just keeps firing, the brass spitting out the side. And those people, human beings, keep falling, tumbling, screaming, and...and...”
“Yeah,” Lauren whispered hollowly.
“Hey,” Breeze stood, grabbing up her jacket. “I gotta get out of here. See ya on The Line, Lauren.”
“Yeah, you, too.”
Lauren didn’t see Breeze leave. She was too busy staring at her clenched fists.
“Lauren?” Lucy asked from some impossible distance. “You okay?”
She croaked, “I think I need a whiskey.”
And then another.
And another.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Hey, you’re sitting up,” Lauren said as she walked into Mike Vinich’s hospital room. She shrugged off her riding coat and propped her helmet on a chair.
Didn’t matter that it was late afternoon. Her head still felt like someone had driven ten-penny spikes into her brain. Lauren had spent too much of her night with her head hanging in the toilet, her stomach trying to pump itself out past her teeth like a prolapsed cow.
Knowing the consequences, she’d drunk as much water as she could hold after each bout of the heaves. And, thankfully, breakfast had stayed put.
Propped on a mound of pillows with a hunting magazine in his hands, Mike’s eyes lit up when he saw her. The weird nose-covering cannula was supplying oxygen, but the hanging bag with the feeding tube was gone. All the stainless steel sparkled as though freshly polished, and she smelled the distinctive odor of cleaning fluid.
“Yeah. Sitting up. Not sure I like it, either. My chest feels like someone yanked it in two and ripped out one of my lungs.”
“That about sums it up.” Lauren took the chair at his bedside and smiled at him. “You look better, though. Are they letting you have solid food?”
Mike laid the magazine on the bedside table, and she could see the majestic six-point elk on the front cover. “Mashed carrots and vanilla pudding. Tasted like baby food.”
“Better than the fare provided by a feeding tube.”
His mouth puckered. “You think?”
Lauren laughed and propped her elbows on the bed to look at him more closely. The fluorescent lights shone on the pink-and-healing scar on his right cheek, where he’d slammed into the truck rack as he fell. “Well, I hope you enjoyed the vanilla. All traffic on the highways has stopped. Truckers aren’t delivering supplies. So think of it as the last vanilla you ever get.”
Mike smoothed one hand over the white sheet at his side, while he considered that. “I heard they’re jerking truckers out of their cabs and murdering ’em for their loads. I wouldn’t risk it either.”
Lauren’s smile faded. “Agar’s on it. Trucks now get Militia escort. Unlike Guard, they don’t worry too much about shooting people. Truck jackings have become a high-risk venture or a quick way to suicide.”
His brows drew together. “But armed escorts, that’s just local, right?”
“And sanctioned. Gotta have state pass to prove what you’re hauling is one of the authorized loads. Stuff critical to keep the state operating. Otherwise, you don’t make it past the highway check points. And there’s no fuel at any price these days. People took every bottle and tin can they had down to their local service station, filled them, and buried them in their back yards.”
“Any way that will ever change?”
“Yeah. The refinery is now running full bore. As long as they can get crude. Word is that they’ll be starting deliveries to service stations by the end of the week as the kinks are worked out of the supply line from the oil fields.
Manufacturing has stopped. Stores are boarded up. Jobs have vanished.
Mike reached out and took Lauren’s hand in a half-unthinking intimacy. “How are things going out there on The Line?”
“Everybody’s holding on by their fingertips. Waiting for the next disaster.”
As he laced his fingers with hers; she was aware of the warmth and gentleness of his touch. After a second or two, he lifted his gaze, and his brown eyes shone. “What happened out there today?”
She stared at him. She could tell he’d heard some rumor, “Nothing.”
“That’s not what the guys who’ve been coming to see me say.” He hesitated for a while, his face tense with worry. Then he cautiously said, “Private Zachary told me you got ambushed out by OP Charlie Able. That true?”
Lauren didn’t answer right away. He was still in frail condition. Getting his heart rate up, and his breathing going, might put an unnecessary strain on his one lung.
“Nothing I couldn’t handle, Mike. I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
Lauren tightened her grip on his hand. The bones felt large and awkward entwined with hers.
“Okay. I get it. Just… Be careful, Lauren.”
“I’m always careful.”
The ghost of a smile came to his face. “Don’t forget, I knew you in high school. You’d ride the rattiest motorcycle or jump off a building if somebody dared you to. I don’t want you to take any chances. You hear me?”
Their gazes held, and it occurred to her that she was a fool for coming to see him every day. Their old friendship was growing into something more. Something she cherished and feared. The least she owed Tyrell—out there fighting for the life of his country—was loyalty.
“Breeze was waiting for me in the bar last night. Said you’d sent her.”
“How’d that go?”
“I don’t know who she is anymore. I mean, the old Breeze, she’d charge Hell with a bucket of water just to see if she could do it. The woman I sat across from last night...?”
“None of us are the same, Lauren. Least of all, you.” He arched an eyebrow, which twisted the cannula on his nose. “So, did you two talk about Jim?”
Lauren shook her head. “Never got that far. She was talking about how she got out of Colorado, and it sort of morphed into the firefight at the I-25 checkpoint.” She chuckled humorlessly. “God, Mike. She was the strong one. Now she’s as fucked up as I am.”
Mike released her hand and brought his clenched fist back to his lap. “You didn’t answer me,” he pointed out. “About when I asked you not to take chances?”
“I won’t take any chances.” She crossed her heart. “Hope to die.”
His mouth quirked. “That didn’t exactly ease my fears.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
“Too late. I’m already rattled.”
They both laughed, and Mike instantly winced and squeezed his eyes closed in pain. “Oh, God, that hurts.”
A nurse wearing green scrubs rushed into the room, went straight to his heart and blood pressure monitor, and said, “What happened, Sergeant? Your heart monitor just rang at my desk. You didn’t try to get up, did you?”
Through gritted teeth, he answered, “No. I just laughed.”
“Well, stop it. The bullet that took out your lung also clipped your heart. It doesn’t need the stress. Understand?” She had an authoritative voice, and when she glared at Lauren it was downright scary.
“I’ll be good,” Mike said in a contrite voice and exchanged an annoyed glance with Lauren.
“It was my fault,” Lauren told the nurse. “I—”
“Visiting hour is over, Ms. Davis,” the nurse informed her. “Go home. Sergeant Vinich needs to sleep.”
Lauren shoved to her feet. “Sure. No problem. I’ll be back tomorrow, Mike.”
“Before you go, militia guy came in to deliver a message from Trevor. Tiffany is supposed to be coming to Cheyenne tomorrow night.”
