Journal (5 page)

Once
I was in the trees, I started walking east, peeking out when I thought it safe
and wondering how someone could get an airplane like that up and running. 
Nothing else works.  Why that?  I felt a sliver of hope that somewhere, somehow,
society was making a comeback; that man’s ingenuity was starting to repair all
the damage that had been done.  I quickly dismissed that thought as too soon
and too unlikely with people like Ponytail out there.  An ordered society would
be needed before real recovery could be achieved. 

It
very shortly became my opinion that the explanation was simpler than that.  The
plane was such a basic machine, it probably didn’t have the same type of sophisticated
electronic components that have failed in about every other mechanical thing. 
That’s the reason my motorcycle carried me so far down roads littered with
useless cars and trucks.  It was old and simple. 

I
next forced my thoughts to more immediate concerns.  What had the pilot spotted
that had drawn his attention?  At this time he’d been up there, essentially in
the same place, for a good ten minutes.  Why?  Then I figured it out, stupid me,
and was running.    

At
one point, several minutes into it, when I slowed to skirt a fallen tree, with
the sounds of my pack banging around and breathing quieted, I could no longer hear
the engine noise.  So I peeked out, a little at first and soon full out onto
the road.  Sure enough, it was gone.  I didn’t know if that was a good sign or
a bad one, though, so I started off again.

I’d
been at it for a good fifteen or twenty minutes more, when I heard a gunshot. 
I don’t know if it was the first one, or if there had been others and they had
just been beyond my hearing, but either way it was not a good thing.  So at
that point, I pulled my rifle from its place in my pack, without much breaking
stride.  Another shot followed a few minutes later, but this one had a
different sound to it; much louder, a different caliber, too.  So there were
two guns at least. in both directionstif

I’d
covered maybe another hundred yards or so before I saw the little plane on the
road where it had apparently landed.  I knew I was close and slowed my pace
considerably.  The pilot was somewhere nearby and, if I figured things right,
so were Gabriel and his mother.  I didn’t understand what was going on at that
point.  There was no plane at the farm where they’d been held, at least as far
as I had seen, so all this confused me.  Was the pilot associated with Mr.
Ponytail, or was he someone entirely unrelated to his gang?  If it was Gabriel
and his mom out there, as it surely must be, why were all these people after
them?  Figuring that out, though, was going to have to wait.

The
next thing I heard was a man’s voice.  “You may as well throw down that gun and
come on out, you hear?  You ain’t getting away, that’s for damn sure.  If I got
to, I’ll just sit and wait ‘til the rest of ‘em catch up.”  Silence.  ”So what
do you say, huh?  Is it worth it?  Why take the chance on you or your kid getting
hurt when it’s just going to end up the same anyway?”  Or something like that.

I
spotted him then.  He was on the other side of the road and about thirty yards
away, standing behind a tree with his back to me.  He had what looked like some
sort of compact carbine in his hands.  That was bad news. 

So
I eased back on the hammer of my rifle, slipped the safety on, and quietly as
possible moved closer.  I should tell you that moving quietly in that type of
situation is no easy task.  You have to split your attention between the threat
on one hand and where your feet are stepping on the other.  If I was looking
down at the same time the pilot turned around, he could pop me one before I
could respond.  On the other hand, if I kept my eyes on him the whole time, I easily
could trip and fall, or make a noise that would give my presence away before I
was ready.  So it was a slow process moving closer to him.  Eventually, I
positioned myself ten or fifteen yards away from him, behind a slight
embankment, and next to a good sized spruce that had toppled halfway across the
road.  In this place, I had an easy shot.

But
of course, now what?  I didn’t want to just shoot him.  I’ve already explained
how I felt after killing Harvey.  Boy that sounds weird doesn’t it, calling him
by his first name like that?  Anyway, I didn’t want to have those same feelings
all over again, but I also couldn’t let him hurt Gabriel and his mom.  So I pushed
off the safety, pointed my rifle and said, “Don’t turn around.  I’ll kill you
if I have to.  Drop your rifle on the ground.”  Again, or something like that.

Well,
as you can imagine he jumped about two feet.  I was so nervous at that point I almost
shot him right then and there, but he didn’t turn around, thank God.  In that
same position, we talked back and forth to one another for a few seconds, and I
guess I was able to convince him that I was serious because he did eventually put
his gun down.  After that, I had him raise his hands up, walk to the center of
the road, and sit down cross-legged style.  I figured he’d have to unfold his
legs if he was going to stand up and that would give me plenty of warning to do
something about it.

He
was a short, barrel-chested man, with a full beard.  He had on a pair of heavy
canvas coveralls, glove 4 2 2 2 2 2 4;}
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ears.  More important, he had an “I’ll kill you and eat your liver” look in his
eyes.  He was caught but not defeated, that’s for sure.

When
I knew my rifle still had his attention, I called out to Gabriel and Anna,
telling them that it was safe to come out.  I still kept my eyes on the pilot,
though.  He could easily have had a pistol hidden on him.  We’d get to that.    

Anna
came out first.  I saw her peer around the trunk of a large pine, probably
making sure it wasn’t some sort of trick.  She looked at me for a couple of
beats without smiling, (of course she wouldn’t smile) and turned around to
signal Gabriel to stay where he was.  It was when she turned back around that I
saw the pistol in her hand, which explained the two different shots I heard. 

As
she approached, the pilot looked back over his shoulder at her.  I told her
that I hadn’t searched him yet.  I figured that I would keep my gun on him
while she checked him for another weapon.  At that point, although we weren’t completely
out of danger, my heart rate finally started to settle down, and the shaking of
my knees diminished enough that nobody would notice how scared I had been.

That’s
when Anna shot him.  She looked back once to make sure Gabriel wasn’t in view and
shot him dead.

There
was an instant, I’ll bet not much more than a couple of seconds in time, when I
thought nothing, felt nothing, and did nothing.  My eyes just held onto the
view of the red gunk shooting out the far side of his head, the blood spurting
out the near side, and the pilot toppling over.  After that, I guess my brain
and body started working again. 

Fear,
no doubt, fear I was maybe next on her hit list, caused me to swing my rifle up
and finger the trigger.  By that time, though, her hand and gun had dropped to
her side, and for just a moment, one breath of life, she let me see inside
her.  Her shoulders rolled forward, her head dropped, her eyes closed tight,
and the pain of what she’d done was there.  Then it was gone.  It was just that
fast.  She squared herself away and looked over at me with no residual of
regret.

“Relax,”
she said.  “It had to be that way.  We couldn’t bring him with us, and he would
have told the others which way we went.  Besides, he would have done the exact
same to you.”  She turned and walked over to the rifle the pilot had dropped
and picked it up.

I
couldn’t believe what I’d just seen.  That was a life she just took, a real
live person.  He wasn’t an immediate threat.  It was done as casually as
scraping your plate before washing it.  Who can do that?  What human being can
snuff a man one second, suffer her act the next, and be back to business
immediately after.  Who was this woman?

As
I replay these events in my head, what, now two days later, I have the luxury
of time and circumstance to interject something into this narrative that Claire
Huston wrote in November 2050.  She said,
“It’s in our nature that we will
suffer unless we receive our own approval.”
  It’s so typically simple of
her, yet so ripe with meaning.  My take not by a long shot.  6it on it is we are basically doomed to be
our own worst critics.  Or less handily, if for whatever reason, expediency,
necessity, even self preservation, we do something that we know is wrong, we
will greatly suffer from the disappointment in ourselves.  I certainly have my own
regrets about things I have done in life, but I can’t even begin to imagine the
amount of pain Anna will suffer for murdering that pilot.

Enough
of that for now.   I’m too exhausted from the day’s walk, and my brain won’t
have any more of those sort of thoughts, so let me return to the events
following the shooting.  I don’t have to reason those out.  I just have to
recall them. 

I
asked her, “Who the hell are you?  Why do these people want you so bad?”

Her
response was a measured one, “There’s no time for that now.  You heard him, others
are coming.  Search him for anything useful and hide his body.”

Oh
that made me mad, real mad, her talking to me that way.  So I fired right back
at her, “You killed him, so you get rid of him.  I’ll take care of the plane.” 
After that, I turned and walked off, hoping she didn’t find my back another
convenient target.

I
quickly searched the plane, finding an extra magazine for the rifle the pilot
had dropped, and a canvas backpack stuffed under the seat.  The bag contained a
water bottle, a few more bullets, and a small amount of food.  I also found
something I couldn’t make sense of at first.  It was three small, capped, clear
plastic bottles, partly filled with gravel.  Each of them had a two-foot long
strip of red cloth tied to its neck.  I also found a black marking pen.

I
held one of these bottles in my hand for a few seconds, looking at it, maybe
even shaking it a time or two, before it came to me.  It must have been how the
pilot communicated with his confederates on the ground.  He wrote notes on the
outside of the bottles with the pen and threw them overboard.  I wondered if,
in this way, he’d already alerted those others he spoke of to the location of
Gabriel and Anna.  I had to assume he had, and they were headed our way.   

The
plane was too big to have any hope of concealing it, so I pushed it off the
side of the road and flipped it over.  I then cut a large piece of fabric from
each wing, not only to make the plane unserviceable, but to augment what we had
for shelter building.  Finally, I cut all the cables, punctured the gas tank,
and broke one of the blades off the prop.  That plane isn’t going anywhere
after that.

When
I got back down the road, Anna and Gabriel were still dragging the body toward
the trees.  When she looked up at me, I tossed her the spare magazine, Gabriel
the rucksack and wing fabric, and told her there was no point anymore to hiding
the body.  His friends were going to find the plane anyway, so our time would
be better spent putting distance between them and us.

After
that, I just started walking north, pretending like I knew exactly which way to
go.  Believe me, it was all bluff …and maybe just a little bit of a need on my
part to turn the tables on Anna.   OK, maybe that had more than just a little bit
to do with it.  I wanted her to think 4 2 2 2 2 2 4;}
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better follow me. 

Anyway,
as I progressed, trying to put some sort of a workable plan together, I figured
the worst thing we could possibly do was keep to the roads.  Even if they
didn’t have any more airplanes up there snooping around, our enemies could
easily set up checkpoints on Highway 20 and all the roads that intersect it and
just pick us off.  Also, my map said north was the Pasayten Wilderness.  To me
that meant plenty of concealment and hard walking, which would further improve
our chance of evading our pursuers.  Finally, because we had started out
walking north from the farm and were now continuing that same way, they might
think that was our true, intended direction of travel.  They might also conclude
we were trying to reach what used to be Canada.  But well before that, I
intended to first turn east and then south.  It was basically the same plan as
before.

Practically
from the first step off, it was a rotten climb.  To make things worse and
further test my self-confidence, a cold relentless rain swept in on us from the
west like a giant tsunami.  I could actually hear it coming a hundred yards off
and smell its musty breath before the first drops peppered the ground around me. 
I remember thinking this day was going to be ten kinds of miserable. 

For
the first five minutes, I moved out smartly and resisted the urge to turn
around to see if they were behind me.  As juvenile as it sounds, I didn’t want
to give her the satisfaction of seeing me check on them.  I was pretty sure I heard
them back there, but I wasn’t positive.  After a while, though, I have to admit
I couldn’t stand it any longer and just had to sneak a look.  So I stopped and
made a show of putting on my poncho and checking my map just to make sure they
were following behind, and, if so, to let them catch-up.