Scott Nicholson - Chronic fear

“Just doing my…job,” he wheezed, causing the wound in his chest to gurgle.

“Me, too,” she said, pointing at his head and squeezing the trigger four times in rapid succession.

Alexis heard Mark laughing behind her, and the triumphant sound mutated into a moist, ragged cough. She ignored him, bending to fish through Scagnelli’s pockets until she found the vial of pills.

Mark wouldn’t keep her from them this time.

She smiled.

Seethe is mine. As it was meant to be.

To do it right and make it look good, she’d need to use Scagnelli’s pistol to kill her husband. Someone was going to reconstruct the scene using advanced forensic techniques, and lying would only tell half the story.

Facts are troublesome things. But they’re the currency of knowledge.

And knowledge is the price we pay to ease the pain of ignorance.

“Lex!” Wendy said, stepping from the shadow of the forest, with Roland and a strange man standing beside her. Both were armed.

Alexis fought the rage that wanted to claim her face, that screamed at her to raise the AR-15 and empty the rest of the clip, that owned her deepest and most intimate core.

Instead, she smiled as if glad to see her old friend. “Wendy!”

Roland rushed to Mark’s side, while the strange man in the camouflage vest looked from Alexis to Scagnelli’s corpse, trying to connect the two. His pistol was pointed skyward, but at a crisp angle that suggested he could lower and fire in the blink of an eye. Alexis let the rifle drop and the man relaxed a little.

“Mark’s been shot,” Alexis said, giving Wendy a quick but desperate hug, already building the lie in her head.

As they gathered over her husband’s unconscious form, Alexis slipped the vial into her hip pocket.

Mine.

“Gundy, where the hell are you?”

Harding’s voice sounded tinny coming from the Selecta’s tiny speaker, or perhaps it was the vast sky and towering trees that made the CIA field director seem diminished and far away.

Gundersson sat on a rock, peering down on the cabin, wondering how many rounds had stuck in the rounded pine logs. “Why didn’t you send choppers, Chief?”

Harding fell silent, and then cleared his throat. “You know that would draw attention. They have press, even out in hillbilly country. Send helicopters overhead and every phone in the county starts ringing.”

“You could have had agents here in twenty minutes.”

“We have protocol and chain of command, Gundy. We can’t just-”

“Chain of command. And who is pulling your end of the chain?”

“Just stay on the scene. Federal agents are less than an hour away, and we have a damage-control team in place, too. Don’t worry, this will get a creative cover story, and your career is well on its way. Couldn’t happen to a more qualified officer, if you ask me.”

Gundersson watched Alexis tending her husband’s wounds. Roland had volunteered his shirt for bandaging and was busy ripping it into cotton strips. Wendy knelt over Mark as well, applying a cool compress to his forehead.

“These agents who are coming,” Gundersson asked. “Are they ours?”

“Of course. You know the CIA doesn’t play well with others.”

“Neither do I.”

Gundersson terminated the call and limped to the creek, electric streaks of pain shooting from his wounds. The water rushed away in a thundering, constant volley, a sheer drop of thirty feet between two massive towers of granite worn slick with time. The pool at the bottom was skimmed with violent froth, and the water beneath it was black with the promise of sunken secrets.

He dropped the Selecta into it, and any sound it might have made was lost in the rush of a current hell-bent for the sea.

Joining the others, he said, “My SUV is a mile away. It’s parked on a logging road.”

“We’re parked on the driveway,” Alexis said, packing cotton swathes around Mark’s two abdominal wounds. The man was deathly white, and he occasionally groaned in pain.

“We can’t risk it,” Gundersson said. “We’ve got company coming.”

Roland gave a rough laugh. “If these were the good guys, I can hardly wait.”

“We need blankets, to keep him warm,” Gundersson said. “They’re flesh wounds, but if he goes into shock, he won’t last long.”

“How do we carry him a mile through this terrain?” Roland said. “Roll him up like a burrito and play ‘pack mule’?”

“Something like that. One thing’s for sure, you don’t want to wait for medivac. You guys got targets on your backs.”

“We’ll tell them everything,” Wendy said.

“Shut up!” Alexis’s outburst was brittle in the peaceful woods, silencing the birds.

Roland touched his wife’s hand, and Wendy looked at Gundersson. Our little secret.

“I’ll go to the cabin and get blankets,” Gundersson said, not giving anyone a chance to question his leadership. “Then we’re heading out.”

Alexis fished a bottle of water from her backpack and put it to her husband’s lips. “Drink this, honey. It’ll help ease the pain.”

“What’s that shit?” Roland said.

“Water.”

Gundersson navigated the animal path back down the mountain, limping on his wounded leg. He wondered if the chicken-thieving fox had used this route on its nightly excursions.

He’d heard a legend that if you killed an animal, you took on its aspects and traits. The predator became its prey.

Wendy hadn’t mentioned her painting, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to carry it back.

Some people said art was timeless, and all art was worthy and had a place in the world.

But Gundersson didn’t believe that.

Some forms of human expression didn’t deserve an audience.

No, some just plain needed burning. And he had a lighter in his pocket. What was one more campfire?

Somewhere out there, Senator Daniel Burchfield was smiling at a camera or shaking hands with a geriatric widow in a wheelchair, promising a secure future built on a strong America.

All while standing on bones and bloody lies and a mountain of ruthless ambition.

Gundersson would go back to the CIA when this was over, when the spin cycle had rinsed away every corpse and every stray bullet, when Burchfield’s mourning for Forsyth ended in primetime melodrama and the selection of a running mate just as ruthless. Gundersson would be there in the shadows, gathering information and keeping a watchful eye.

Maybe he was still an idealist, but he believed in freedom, even if he had deep doubts about his country and its kings.

If Seethe and Halcyon had taught him anything, it was that you had to stand guard most faithfully against the enemy within.

The path opened before him, and he became a fox on the prowl.

“How much does he know?” Alexis asked.

“Some,” Roland said.

“Do you guys trust him?”

Roland shrugged and Wendy looked off in the distance with the vacant expression she’d worn in the Monkey House when Sebastian Briggs had lulled her into surrender.

“Wallace Forsyth is dead,” Alexis said. “Seethe and Halcyon dies with him. Okay?”

“That’s bullshit, Lex,” Wendy said, suddenly present. “It lives inside us. There’s only one way out.”

“We’re not going out like Anita did.” Alexis nodded toward Scagnelli’s cooling corpse. “I’ll bet that scumbag did her in.”

Roland put his arm around Wendy, brushed a sweaty, stringy strand of hair behind her ear, and kissed the side of her filthy face. “We’re sticking together this time, honey,” he said. “All of us.”

He broke away and did an awkward, pained dance, breaking into a variation on the old television theme song, “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees.”