Exile Hunter (52 page)

Linder awoke before
Rhee’s head hit the ice. He threw off his blanket and sat upright,
peering at the dull light coming through the lace-curtained windows.
What did it mean? This dream was so different from the others. These
dead men did not reproach him and demanded nothing from him. Instead,
they offered him a glimpse into their thoughts at the moment of
death, and shared with him a peace that he would never have expected
after having seen so many men die in anguish.

* * *

The rest of the week
passed uneventfully. Linder switched off his conscious brain while on
the packaging line and performed his duties on automatic pilot.
Meanwhile, his subconscious mind was working overtime.

En route home in the
jitney van one afternoon, he noticed a disabled pickup truck on the
shoulder and a middle-aged cowboy kneeling beside it to fix a flat
tire. From a distance, the figure reminded Linder of Will Browning,
and on impulse, he asked the driver to stop the van. But when he came
closer to the cowboy, the resemblance to Browning vanished.

Later, on arriving in
town, he stopped at the sandwich shop to buy a beer and spotted
another uncanny resemblance. At the head of the line of customers was
a young man with a wiry physique and long black hair that spilled
over his ears and onto his collar like Rhee’s. Even the youth’s
voice, though indistinct against the background noise, seemed to have
an intonation and pitch like Rhee’s.

Once again, Linder felt
compelled to approach the man but, as they came face to face, he saw
that the youth was years younger than Rhee, not Asian, and far softer
in body than the sinewy Rhee. Linder returned quickly to the end of
the queue, shaken and half expecting to find someone next with a
resemblance to Scotty.

Over dinner, while Mrs.
Unger was in the kitchen, Linder’s thoughts turned to Scotty once
more, recalling their first meeting in the camp infirmary, when
Linder had given him Roger Kendall’s uneaten dinner and gained a
loyal friend. Soon after, the Kaska had given him his compass and
Linder had promised the dying Kendall to come to the aid of his wife
and daughter in Utah.

That night his dreams
returned, and Linder saw himself in a schoolroom with rows of long
tables facing a blackboard. But instead of students, a dozen
working-aged men and women sat at the tables and read newspapers,
solved puzzles or slept. Linder noticed one woman in particular, tall
and slender, dressed in freshly pressed blue jeans and a white
sleeveless blouse. Her mahogany hair, worn in a ponytail, was
streaked with gray and her olive complexion was tanned and lined from
hard work and worry. She sat erect and seemed to stare at the vacant
blackboard as if in a trance. As in his dream the night before,
Linder seemed to observe her from all directions at once and even to
read her thoughts and emotions. Instantly, he picked up vague
feelings of failure, regret, and despair, and a longing to regain a
sense of her life’s purpose. Drawing away from her now, Linder felt
that the room and the building were very real indeed and perhaps
within closer reach than he had thought. And as to who the woman was,
there could be no doubt.

* * *

Throughout the
weekend, Linder thought of little else but his dream of Patricia
Kendall. By the time he awoke Monday morning, he believed he knew
what the dream meant and had seized on a plan.

After work on Monday,
Linder visited Jay in his office to report the completion of a
special project Jay had given him. Jay praised his work and repeated
his offer of a salary raise once his probationary period was over.

“That’s okay, Jay.
I didn’t come here to hit you up for a raise. But there is
something you could help me with, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“I’ll do what I
can,” Jay said, tilting back in his swivel chair.

“I’d like your
advice, based on your time at Kamas,” Linder began, checking to
make sure the door was fully closed behind him. “I’m trying to
locate someone who may have been transferred to Kamas to serve out
the last months of her sentence. How do they handle releases over
there? Do they use parole or probation or halfway houses? How might I
go about making a discreet inquiry?”

Jay gave Linder a
severe look.

“Helping you with
something like that could come back and bite me in the ass,” he
replied with a stern look. “I think maybe I’d rather give you the
raise.”

Linder ignored the
bluster and waited for Jay to go on. Though talking about the camps
might be uncomfortable for Jay, the information sought from him was
not highly sensitive and put him at little risk.

“The CLA won’t
reveal the names of individual prisoners at a camp like Kamas,” he
answered after a pause. “If your friend is there, you won’t be
able to find out anything about her till she’s released. And it
could be risky to ask about her even then. On the other hand, you
might go about trying to find her by staking out the state employment
office closest to where she lives.”

“What does the
employment office have to do with anything?” Linder asked.

“Every released
prisoner, political or criminal,” Jay went on, leaning forward now
and lowering his voice, “is supposed to be placed in a job after
he’s out, even if it’s some bullshit job like picking up trash on
a road crew. But since there are never enough jobs to go around,
until your friend gets placed, she’ll have to punch in at a
reassignment center for four hours a day to qualify for benefits.”

Jay offered a
conspiratorial smile, apparently pleased at exposing the small ways
in which the regime controlled prisoners’ lives even after their
release from captivity.

“These reassignment
centers, how would I find them?” Linder asked.

“They’re usually
located in the same building as the state employment office. That
would be the town hall or county office building,” Jay explained.
“So if this person were released from Kamas but required to stay in
Summit County, as ex-prisoners usually are, you’d have to check the
employment offices in each town in the county, starting with Park
City, Heber, Kamas and so on.”

“Can you think of any
other way I could track her down, maybe through a network of former
prisoners or a support group for prisoners’ families?”

“I wouldn’t know
about that,” Jay replied, “but I could ask my dad. At one point
he must have known some people in the New Underground Railroad,
because they helped him arrange my release.”

“The NUR, here in
Utah?” Linder had heard of the organization, but knew little about
it, as the DSS had never succeeded in penetrating it beyond the
arrest of a few low-level operators.

“Sure. As far as I
can tell, the NUR operates in all the restricted zones. They help
released prisoners reunite with their families and, in many cases,
provide forged documents so they can start new lives outside the
zones. Think of the NUR like the witness protection program, except
that it hides people
from
the government, not
for
it.”

“Could you ask Larry
if he still has contacts with them? I might want to get in touch some
time,” Linder added as he rose to leave.

“I’ll ask,” Jay
responded. “But don’t get your hopes up. Still, if you ever find
a safe way out of this damned country of ours, for God’s sake, take
me with you.”

* * *

On the following
Saturday, when the vitamin plant was closed, Linder took a bus to
Park City and found the state employment office on the outskirts of
town. The historic Old Town had been devastated by avalanches after
five years of monstrous snowfalls that created mini-glaciers hundreds
of feet deep at the upper elevations of the Wasatch Mountains.

Despite the population
losses Park City suffered during the Events and the insurgency, and
from the mass arrests and forced resettlements that followed, the
town had stayed alive by attracting new inhabitants. Most recently,
these had been military and security personnel, civil servants, and
government contractors. But far more numerous were the refugees from
California and Nevada who had fled natural disasters and civil unrest
during the Events and became squatters in former rental units and
vacation homes that the Unionist regime had seized.

Even now, years after
the Events, these refugees subsisted primarily on government
benefits, augmented by the proceeds of petty crime, and clashed
frequently with long-time residents who had clung to their homes.
Everywhere he looked, buildings were rundown and shoddily maintained,
as the refugee squatters had little pride of ownership or incentive
to make improvements.

Linder looked off to
the mountains, where the town’s eponymous ski resort had been.
There he saw oversize bulldozers push snow away from open gashes in
the hills as newly licensed open-pit silver mines were being carved
out from the former ski slopes. While the mines would offer
much-needed employment for a few, the earth-moving equipment used to
create them spewed dense exhaust into an atmosphere already toxic
with smoke from the uncontrolled burning of local coal and wood.

Linder kept a watchful
eye on the street numbers along Kearns Boulevard so he would not miss
the state employment office among the strip malls and flea markets
lining the busy thoroughfare. In nearby meadows too steep for tent
cities or FEMA trailers, wildflowers bloomed in a bizarre contrast
between natural beauty and man-made blight.

Linder found the
employment office beside a strip mall. A sign on the door confirmed
that the office was closed on weekends, so he noted the office hours
and walked across the street to a coffee shop to buy a cup to go. Two
doors down, at a state liquor store, where sullen drunks milled about
waiting for the doors to open, Linder asked the uniformed security
guard whether the same sort of crowd appeared every day.

“It’s always worst
at opening time and at five, when the rubber room empties out and the
derelicts make a beeline to blow their wages on booze and weed,”
the guard replied sourly.

It seemed that every
main street and strip mall in Utah had at least one state liquor
store. Linder had shopped at the Coalville branch once to buy a pint
of gin and recalled the monumental headache he experienced after only
a few sips. Later he learned that the state liquor monopoly carried
only the rawest gin and vodka, along with ersatz whiskey and
rum—altogether undrinkable stuff. As in the former Soviet Union,
the excise taxes on alcohol had become a major source of revenue for
the regime. Spirits and regulated cannabis were now advertised
heavily on billboards and buses alongside state lottery tickets.
Linder imagined the elders and bishops of Utah’s banned LDS church
spinning in their shallow sub-arctic graves.

Nominal government
control of alcoholic spirits did not, however, keep cheaper bootleg
material off the streets. The illegal stuff was often tainted with
wood alcohol and other poisons that killed or blinded its victims,
sometimes with the very first swig. Though some decent whiskey
occasionally made its way down from Canada and onto the black market,
even that could be counterfeit and was generally not safe to drink,
unless you brought it over the border yourself or knew the person who
did.

Having settled on a
plan for his next visit to the employment office, Linder walked a few
blocks and caught the next bus for Coalville. On Monday, he asked Jay
for an extended lunch break later in the week. Jay offered him
Wednesday, and Linder rode a van from the industrial park to Kearns
Avenue at midday, arriving at the employment office just before one
o’clock to watch the applicants file in. He returned after work at
five to watch them leave but saw no one with the slightest
resemblance to Patricia Kendall.

The next week, he
requested another long lunch break to observe the mid-day arrivals.
Still no luck.

The week after that, he
tried the employment office at Heber, east of Park City. One week
later, he staked out the Kamas office.

By then, Linder’s
foreman had begun to complain of his frequent absences and, not long
after, Jay took him aside to inquire if he had any luck finding his
buddy’s wife.

“Not yet, but I’m
not giving up,” Linder replied wearily.

“How many offices
have you covered?” Jay asked.

“I’ve staked out
Park City, Heber, and Kamas, with no luck at all,” Linder answered.
“I could go back and try them all again but I’m beginning to
think it would be a waste of time. Assuming she’s not allowed to
move out of Summit County, where else could she be?”

“Have you tried the
Coalville office?”

Linder gave a quizzical
look.

“Coalville?”

“Sure, even our
little town has a rubber room for the unemployed. Why not give it a
shot?” Jay suggested.

“Might as well,”
Linder replied, brightening. “Do you mind if I leave a bit early
tomorrow afternoon to check it out?”

“Go for it,” Jay
replied, and resumed signing a stack of paychecks, for the next day
was the last Friday of the month, and payroll was due.

* * *

At half past four the
following afternoon, Linder stepped off the jitney bus at Center and
Main and walked up to the receptionist’s window at Coalville City
Hall.

“Excuse me,” he
asked, noticing that the woman was already busy tidying up her desk
for an early Friday departure. “I’m looking for the state
employment office. Is it in this building?”

“It’s one more
block north on your right,” she replied without looking up at him.
“You can’t miss it.”

Linder walked the extra
block to 100th Street North and found an imposing Romanesque-style
building of carved stone dating from the town’s salad days at the
turn of the twentieth century. He had never been inside, but knew it
as the Summit County Courthouse. Noticing a recent addition at the
building’s rear, he bypassed the front entrance and walked around
the side. Finding no entrance, he retraced his path and found his way
blocked by a Summit County Sheriff’s car driven by the same deputy
sheriff who had nearly arrested him on his first day in town.