Bernard’s voice sighed with exhaustion. “I should have known something was terribly wrong with you. You’re broken.”
Those were true words, but, at the moment, he was more damaged than Bernard could ever guess. He realized he’d been holding the pool of blood in his palm, so he squatted down and wiped it on the gray carpet. When he got back to his feet, he swayed with wooziness. He also thought the hearing in his left ear was gone.
“I think this is Hell, actually. I’ve met the men I murdered. Right now, I’m talking to you, but a dead man named Jacob came and visited me, too.”
“Who’s Jacob?” Bernard’s voice asked.
“I’m still alive, you ass!” Jacob yelled from his cell.
Dwight smiled. “He’s Jacob.”
A long pause followed. He used the time to sit on the floor next to the desk. If the previous day was any indication, he would soon want to crawl under and return to the fetal position.
“Just tell me one thing, Bernard, and this is important.”
“What?” the man’s voice replied, sounding impatient.
“You’ve traveled with me for a long enough time. You’ve no doubt entered the spirit world with me. Did you ever see my bird Poppy?” He expected cursing, or laughter, or a sarcastic answer. What he got, instead, was a serious reply.
“I have seen her, believe it or not. She’s at your cell door right now.”
He whipped his head toward the cage door. Sure as the sunrise, Poppy waddled her way between the bars as she came into the room. The green, red, and blue bird had a long tail that dragged behind her.
Jacob laughed from around the corner. “They must have baked insanity into today’s treatment.”
Dwight ignored the bad man. Instead, he watched as Poppy walked the carpet for a few moments before she made a beeline for his half-eaten breakfast. She leaned over and lifted a soggy piece of cereal.
“Hey, that’s mine!” he snapped. “At least ask first, little lady.”
She ignored him.
He didn’t care too much about her thievery. Poppy was back. She was all that mattered. He’d give his bird the whole tray if he could, simply to say thanks for being in his life.
“If I have to die a thousand deaths to see my friend Poppy, I’ll do it willingly.”
Jacob cackled. “David’s cube works as advertised. I’m getting sicker by the minute. Going crazy, too. I don’t hear the person you call Bernard…yet. However, as God as my witness, I think I’m seeing your damned bird!”
Colorado Springs, CO
The military convoy passed through Capulin and Brent made his group wait an hour before they followed, since it was going the same way they were. Despite being vigilant for evidence of the other convoy, they never caught up to it. Now he and Trish were near Colorado Springs, looking at a new highway with a different set of vehicles cruising by.
“Where do you think this group is going?” she asked.
All the traffic was headed south, but it wasn’t the normal flow of the interstate. Every vehicle was a tractor trailer hauling an empty flatbed. Somewhere to the north, he assumed either Colorado Springs or Denver, those trucks had made their deliveries. Now they were deadheading to their next pickup.
“They could be going back to the Amarillo airport, for all we know. Wouldn’t it be ironic? They can pick up the scrap metal.” They both got a good laugh at the image.
They’d driven for a couple of hours since Capulin, putting them on the southern outskirts of Colorado Springs. By happenstance, one of the ex-prisoners had been born in the area and knew where to find Cheyenne Mountain. Andre had pointed to the area of green hills about ten miles away, where the flat terrain at the edge of the Great Plains met the early folds of the Rocky Mountains. To get there, however, they needed to wait for the interstate to clear out.
She sat with her boots up on the dashboard again. “First, we saw the convoy of military guys from other countries. Now we see empty flatbeds. You don’t think they had tanks on those things, do you?”
He shrugged at first, but as he thought it through, an answer emerged. “I don’t think they were tanks. Who would they fight here in the middle of literal nowhere? There are no American citizens—”
“Except for us,” she reminded him.
“Yeah, except for us. But we’re all the opposition we know of, and we have four Chevy Tahoes and a few pop-guns. They could take us out with a couple of missiles or even a five-dollar box of nails under our tires. A tank would be overkill.”
“I wish we had a tank,” she lamented.
“Don’t worry. For our purposes, a handful of fuel haulers will do a lot more damage than a tank ever could. More importantly, we’ll get away from the battle without taking fire from the enemy. That’s why I really enjoyed what we did back at Amarillo airport.”
She brightened. “I trust you, Brent. I’ve been with you on everything since you rescued me from Curtis and his gang back at my trailer. I guess I’m already tired of fighting.”
He thought again of Vietnam. Back then, they didn’t have the choice to be tired or not. They went out into the jungle, suffered through the rain, heat, and bullets, then kept doing it for two years straight. Still, as he sat at the wheel of his truck looking over the upcoming battlespace, he admitted age had caught up to him. He was tired as hell, too.
“We have one more job to do, Trish. If we stuff three or four tankers down into the throat of their bunker headquarters, I’m sure we’ll take out their base of operations. Then, this—” He pointed to the trucks driving by. “—will all dry up. We can get our nation back.”
Long knocked on this side window. He’d come up from one of
