State of Rebellion

Pulling into his apartment complex in Roseville shortly before seven, he climbed the flight of stairs and unlocked the door to his apartment. “Pack enough for a few days and we’ll send the rest.” That’s what she’d said. As he closed the door and set the dead bolt, he flicked on the lights, simultaneously noticing the smell of cigarette smoke.

“Mr. Stevenson?”

Stevenson jerked around, startled by the voice. “Who’re you?”

“No need to worry, Mr. Stevenson. We’re with the FBI, and we have a few questions.”

“But I just answered all your questions,” he blurted, startled to see a second man who was standing in the corner of the room. “Hey, you’re not FBI. I’m calling the police, and-”

“You’re calling nobody,” the second man said, stepping forward, his heavily tattooed arms now visible in the lamp light. He brandished a pistol in Stevenson’s face. “Have a seat. We’d still like to ask you a few questions. Since you’ve already had a jabber with the Feds, it shouldn’t be hard for you to repeat the message.”

Stevenson’s face blanched, and his legs felt weak. Shoved hard in the chest, he fell into a chair behind him. “Now, Mr. Stevenson,” his antagonist said in a calm drone, “this will be a rather unusual question-and-answer session, I’m afraid. You’ll have to respond by nodding your head, yes or no,” he said, slapping a piece of duct tape across Stevenson’s mouth. “If your answer needs talkin’,” he said to the terrified man, “you’ll have to write the answer on this here clipboard. Just to be sure it don’t slip off your lap, we’ll just lock it down,” he snarled, revealing a construction-type staple gun, which he used to drive a double-pronged staple through the clipboard into Stevenson’s knee, causing the terrified man to jerk upright in the chair, eyes blazing with pain.

The pain increased over the next hour to the point where Stevenson’s mind could no longer react to the repeated demands for information. The crude map he’d drawn on the clipboard was barely recognizable. Even Captain Roger Dahlgren, who accompanied First Sergeant Otto Krueger, had, at times, been forced to look away from Stevenson’s agony.

“I’m tellin’ ya, he told us everything he knew.”

“That’s what you hope,” Dahlgren said. “By the time you finished with him, he couldn’t have remembered his mother’s name. I told you to ease up. What if he knew more, or if he lied?”

“No chance, Captain. You haven’t got the stomach for what’s necessary,” Krueger scoffed. “He didn’t lie, and he got what he deserved.”

“Yeah, right,” Dahlgren said. “Tell that to the commander when you try to explain that the computer data disks are in some cabin near Clear Lake, and you don’t know what’s on ’em, and just in case they’re not there, that the informant’s dead.”

Shorter than Dahlgren by nearly a foot, and burly, Krueger replied, “We’ll find ’em, Captain. We’ll call the commander, and he can still get there before that useless female agent.”

Dahlgren looked once more at the slumped, bloody body and turned to leave, pausing at the door.

“If I remember right, this useless female agent is the same woman who put one between the eyes of your bank-withdrawal associate. Let’s get out of here before the neighbors smell the stench and call the cops.”

“Let’s call the commander. If he can get there before her, she’ll come up empty and think this guy lied to her.”

“Yeah, that’s a big if. Leave the message.”

Otto picked up the staple gun, blood still oozing from the handle, and stepped over to the now-silent body. He placed a small California bear flag against the dead man’s chest and fired the stapler once more. “Death to Traitors” was scribbled across the flag, affixed to what once had been the living, breathing body of Richard Clarke Stevenson. Newly appointed to his long-sought career position, Stevenson now sat lifeless in his apartment, his bloody head slumped to his chest. Surveying the room once more before leaving, Otto pulled off his rubber gloves and threw them on the floor.

“Have a nice day, Mr. Stevenson.” He spat at Stevenson’s lifeless body as he closed the door.

Dan and Nicole were lost in their own thoughts during much of the steep, uphill climb. The quiet and darkness were almost welcome in the growing tension of the hunt. Reaching the crest, Dan stopped the Blazer and turned off the headlights and engine, plunging Nicole and himself into silence and near total darkness.

“Sorry, but nature’s call waits for no man,” he said, stepping out of the car and disappearing off the dirt road.

There was an overcast sky, completely hiding the moon, and only an occasional star shone through the growing cloud cover. Nicole stood outside the vehicle for a moment, and when Dan returned to the car, she gathered the courage to ask him about the voices of his ancestors he always spoke about. He laughed at first, but quickly understood the seriousness of her question.

“But do you actually hear them, Dan?”

He pulled her close. “No, I’m not schizophrenic. They don’t really speak to me. I thought about it years ago and came to the conclusion that they were somehow. . well. . genetically implanted in me. It’s almost as if I really knew them. Actually, it answered a lot of questions I had about reincarnation and other unexplainable beliefs. Imagine, if you will, that our cells-our individual DNA-come with implanted memory from our ancestors. Tiny computer chips that contain the memory of the ages. I know it sounds far-fetched, but if such a thing actually happens, it would account for people who can speak foreign languages under hypnosis and remember places they’ve never been. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

Nicole was silent for a moment. “We are them, you mean?”

“In a sense. We add our own experiences to their knowledge, but basically, we are the current rendition of all those who have created us and made us who we are. We can still choose to do different things, act differently, even deny our basic instincts, but we can never really escape our heritage. If one believes that. .” he said, pausing a moment to formulate his thoughts, “then it becomes important that we live so that our children and their children will benefit from our actions, rather than spend their energies trying to overcome whatever bad tendencies we’ve created. The theory could go in many directions, if you wanted to pursue it to its extreme. Psychologists could have a ball with it.”

“Is that something your grandfather taught you?” Nicole asked.

“No.” Dan laughed. “It’s vintage Rawlings Psychology 501-of my own making.”

Nicole stepped back to the Blazer and opened the door. “No time for philosophy tonight, Mr. Rawlings. We’ve got a tight timetable, but I think I understand your theory.”

They reentered the Blazer, then crested the mountain road and commenced down the other side. “One other thing, Nicole,” Dan said, anticipating Nicole’s thoughts. “I haven’t had my dream about Susan’s accident or any trouble sleeping for a couple of months now.”

She remained quiet, accepting Dan’s way of thanking her for entering his life and helping to put a troublesome and difficult memory to rest.

Reaching State Road 53, Dan turned north and began to search for the Anderson-Marsh Park Road. Several miles up that canyon there would be a side trail, Stevenson had told Nicole, which would be identified by a rusted bulldozer pushed off the side of the California Forestry Department’s fire trail. Finally, after making two passes, a small, faded sign reading Anderson-Marsh State Park appeared, and they turned off the gravel road onto a dirt fire trail. As dark as it was, only the glow from their headlights provided any guidance, and then only for short distances as the road broke left and right. Finally, after going about six miles, Nicole told Dan to stop and back up. Shining her flashlight to the side of the road, she spotted the broken bulldozer, now partially covered with brush and new growth.

“Can you turn around on this road? Stevenson said the trail was about a hundred yards farther south from this bulldozer, running east another three or four hundred yards to the cabin.”

Dan maneuvered the Blazer around and located the fire trail, following it slowly. Dan spotted the cabin first and angled the car so the headlights provided partial illumination.

“Let’s get the shovel and walk around back. It’s gonna be hard with everything so dark. Can you leave the headlights on?”

“Yeah, for awhile. We don’t want a dead battery up here at night.”

Behind the cabin, Nicole tried to identify the landmarks Stevenson had named, tripping over fallen logs and righting herself again.