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FBR Scene 5
She carefully placed her feet through the wet fiddle neck
ferns, making sure of her balance before reaching for the
mushrooms. Even though fall was the normal time for mushroom
hunting, there had been a few warm rains, and Darlene had
found enough mushrooms over the last few days to provide
a welcome relief to all their diets.She was off the ridge,
across the stream and almost a mile west of the rock shelter,
home,” she thought. She had just walked up the ridge
line of this hill to near the summit. She listened carefully.
Ben had done a good job of making them all scared of being
found by anyone. She heard nothing human, and Jasper was
busy with Mark this morning running the trap line east of
the camp.
She had been too frightened to do this before, but she
just had to know. Jasper was like fog in the woods, you
never knew where she was, but she had watched her leave
this morning with Mark and had followed them for a few minutes
to make sure they headed out. She had told Ben and Bea that
she was going mushroom hunting to clear her head.
She fished beneath her waterproof poncho to a leather bag
that all of them carried, Bea called them possibility bags.
It was rabbit skin of course, big enough to hold greens,camus
bulbs, and plastic bags balled up at the bottom for less
clean items like pitch wood or crayfish. A soft strap of
twisted rabbit hide looped over her opposite shoulder to
comfortably keep the bag in place.
Darlene burrowed down and found it. Her heart gave a guilty
beat, as she felt the smooth cold plastic of her cell phone.
She had stolen it from the shelf where Ben kept all the
phones fully charged. No one was to use any of them, and
they were left off with their batteries separate when they
weren't physically on the charger. Ben had told them that
the phone's GPS locater chips worked anytime the phone was
on, whether you called anyone or not, and that there were
some who said the Feds could actually turn on the phone
and poll the GPS chip anytime that the battery was in it.
She had snatched the phone and buried it in the bottom
of the bag as soon as Bea and Ben went outside to work on
projects. Hopefully no one would be paying attention and
notice that one of the three phones was missing.
“Yes.”
“It's Darlene.”
There was silence on the other end.
“Patricia?”
“No names you dumb bitch.”
“Sorry,” Darlene rushed to apologize.
“I had given up on you. You have been a very bad
girl. More, you have been a very bad mother. Don't you care
about your son?”
“Don't you hurt my son, I couldn't call, not until
now, he has all the phones, I had to steal it, I had to
wait, this was the first,” her voice caught in a hiccup,
her words crashing out.
“Wow, I didn't hurt your son, now did I? But we had
an agreement didn't we?
Darlene was silent, listening. She was disparate to find
out if her son was OK, was being cared for.
“Didn't we.”
“Yes.”
“What did you agree to do?”
Darlene hesitated, and then spoke plaintive, soft. “To
call you every week.”
“What did I agree to do?”
“To keep Jimmy at the group home.”
“Have you kept your agreement?”
“I couldn't, I just told you, we are like, like prisoners
here. Ben controls everything, I'm taking a big chance right
now . . .”
Patricia interrupted, “So you didn't keep your agreement
and decided your son was not as important as your comfort.
So you got your son turned over to adult care, but they
didn't pick him up because they are, well, not responding.
So you decided that the group home should turn him out onto
the street in the winter. You're one hell of a mother.”
“You turned him out on the street?” Darlene
wailed, “but you promised, I called you, I told you
where we were. How could you do that,” she screamed
at the phone, her voice echoing off the far hillside.
“I didn't do it. You did. Your decision, my hands
were tied by our agreement. What could I do, I can't save
everyone. Do you understand what is going on in the world
you idiot? I certainly can't save some broken boy, not with
good, whole people dying, right and left? You did this,
only you Darlene, you turned your son out to die on the
street.”
Darlene sobbed, mucus ran down her face.
“But not everyone is a liar and some of us treat
our “friends” better than they deserve.”
“What?” muttered Darlene, lost in the image
of her son freezing to death in a wheelchair, alone.
“I'm saying I went the extra mile for you Darlene.
I saved your son, I got him back into another facility,
a government facility. I saved your son Darlene.”
Patricia's voice grew tender and soft. “I did it for
you Darlene because I know you try, you do try. You work
hard. It is that fucking Ben who hurt you, who almost killed
your son. I saved him, I saved your son because I'm your
friend Darlene.”
“yes, yes you are, oh thank you so much Patricia.
Oh thank you, oh my god, when I think of Jimmy on the street,
oh god.”
“Calm down, relax, friends take care of each other.
Now you have to do better about calling me, and there is
so much to catch up on. Do you have time for a friend? Can
you help me now?”
Ten minutes later Patricia hung up the phone. She had simply
hoped Ben and his group could simply have died from the
flu. Hell, she thought, she had even sent in a team to make
sure they were infected. She had the team vaccinated but
they carried enough of the virus in capsules in their mouths
to infect at least the women, while they raped them. She
didn't want Global involved in this any longer. Arthur had
become much too interested in this little side project of
hers; she could feel him nosing about out there, trying
to find the value.
She tapped the table top. Ben was a loose end and he needed
to be tied off. Her conversation with that twit Darlene
had been quite informative. Idly she brought up the screen
of test subjects that were used during the first three months.
The vaccine had been rushed to completion, and in the beginning
she knew that palative measures had be researched too. Anything
to give certain people more time to wait for the final vaccine.
That wait had been crucial and successful, thanks to the
many volunteers who had given their lives in the early trials.
It had been worth it, the vaccine was nearly ninety percent
effective if administered directly into the blood stream
before exposure to the live virus. Vaccine production was
in priority mode at every facility that could produce it,
here, Europe, Asia, Australia. The right people had breathed
a tremendous sigh of relief and sat back to watch a new
world unfold. With half the population, oil, coal, all resources
would go farther, global warming would be slowed, and good
patriotic Americans could get to work on forging a new world
that was disciplined, strong, and pure.
Patricia hit the page down a few times and saw Jimmy's
name. Gee, he hadn't even made it through the first trial.
He had died only 48 hours after she had in placed him in
the program. Well, he was weak, just like his mother, she
thought, but he had performed a useful service.
“As will Darlene,” she spoke out loud to her
empty office.
Darlene slipped into the shelter, her basket filled with
morels. She quickly replaced the phone on the shelf, carefully
detaching the battery and got back to work, her face flushed,
immensely relieved that her son was getting the best of
care. Patricia had done so much for her, she had been a
fool to go with Mark, he wasn't really interested in her
anyway.
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FBR chapter 6, scene 6
Foreign Body Reaction, Alan McNeill
Chapter 6 Scene 5.
The floor of the forest moved. There it did it again. “Wow,”
thought Jasper. She let her vision go wide, feeling, seeing,
smelling and hearing the entire slope before her. In seeing
it all, it was easy to see the small changes making their
way up the slope towards the berry and alder bramble where
Mark had left her a few minutes before. The movements were
that of large gophers but without the hills and holes. Just
swellings that rustled and ever so slightly moved. There
were seven people sized gophers moving up the hill. They
were really obvious once you knew how to look.
Jasper melted back through the blackberries, without disburbing
a single cane. She stayed low until she was over the crown
of the road cut above her, then set off after Mark. She
stopped every few hundred yards to crawl to the edge of
the road and check the mountain side below her. She didn't
find any other big gophers except those seven that were
moving slowly up the ridge towards home.
Jasper was looking for deer or elk, which with her help
Mark had come to prefer as their main meat source. They
had thinned out the rabbits and Mark had finally become
comfortable with Jasper getting in close to the larger game
and spearing it, quickly and quietly.
It was the first week of March and Jasper toyed with her
small spear, twirling like a baton as she ambled down the
road. She took no pains to hide herself here as the crows
were taunting what they believed was an owl hiding in a
tree, which required a lot of crows because they had nothing
good to say about owls, and of vice versa too. However,
they made excellent lookouts and had already dismissed Jasper
as not worthy of interrupting their deadly serious task
of owl harassment, all the more funny to Jasper as they
were yelling at a small dead fall of leaves and twigs stuck
in near the tree top. There was no owl there, but Jasper
knew how crows were, it really didn't matter, for if nothing
else it was good practice. Jasper liked crows because they
had loud opinions, good eye sight and great hearing. If
any human approached, long before she would hear them, the
crows would be delighted to tell the entire forest about
it. Yep, you could always count on crows.
Mark was squatted checking for tracks, vehicle tracks,
when Jasper appeared next to him.
“Christ!” said Mark. “I told you to watch
the hillside until I got back.” He calmed himself
down. Since Jasper's “transformation” as he
thought of it, he was no longer the peerless woodsman. Now,
when Jasper was in the forest he felt like he had a flashing
neon sign on him.
One day he had made every effort to loose her, ending up
completely hidden in a leaf and bramble blind. He didn't
like to brag, at least to others, but he couldn't think
of anyone, military or otherwise who should have been able
to find him. Besides, Jasper had no clue that he was trying
to hide from her. He just wanted to see if he could do it.
While he had slowly been studying, with no motion of his
head, the small area in front of the blind, he had become
aware of her head right next to his, trying to see what
Mark was looking at. He hadn't heard her, hadn't seen her.
She just materialized as far as Mark was concerned.
Jasper found almost everything funny, at least when she
was in the woods with him, but she seemed anxious now.
“There are seven people working up the hillside towards
home. They are wearing some sort of complete camouflage
and they are moving very slowly. I didn't see weapons, and
their camoflage is really good.”
“Shit, Ben needs to know this right now. I hope everyone
is at the shelter.”
“When I left, everyone but Darlene was close by.”
“Where was Darlene?”
“I don't know, collecting mushrooms I think. After
I tell Ben about the men, should I go get her?”
Mark gathered his gear and said show me where you saw the
men, then tell Ben and go get Darlene. I don't know what
Ben is going to want to do about this, but if your description
is acurate, then I think we are looking at soldiers in ghilly
suits, and they will be armed. Christ I don't know what
we're going to do now.”
“Do you want me to stop them?” said Jasper
as they set off up the deer trail, cutting directly back
to the shelter.
Mark put his arm around her shoulder and said, “
No, no honey, these men are more than a match for you. Think
of them as a hunting machine. If they are military we need
to stay away from them.”
Jasper looked at Mark, “Why are then coming here?”
Mark shook his head. “I don't know but I bet it is
somehow tied up with that woman you saw the day, ah the
day.” He hesitated, he hadn't talked much about that
day with anyone, he wasn't sure what Jasper saw or remembered.
“Anyway, I'm sure we'll find out.”
As Mark set off directly up hill Jasper lagged a bit behind,
listening. The crows were diverted from the owl practice,
they were cawing at something larger and noisier than the
men gophers. She jogged after Mark wondering how not to
scare him with the news. Trucks are coming too. |
