Off the Grid (25 page)

Ten minutes before, Joe looked through the bullet-punched windshield of Phil Parker’s pickup and thought he was seeing things. The shattered glass, he thought, had surely distorted and enlarged the images of oncoming vehicles into what looked like a convoy that included two full-sized eighteen-wheel tractor-trailers.

He leaned his head out the open driver’s-side window and squinted.

It had not been an illusion. On the horizon, the sun glinted off the toothy chrome grille of a semitruck, then another right behind it. Two of the white pickups he’d seen earlier led the two big rigs, and pickups number three and four trailed the procession.

“Oh no,” Jan said. “Those are the trucks I was telling you about. The ones with the EMP devices in them.”

“Your pal Ibby,” Joe said.

“They must be headed to Utah.”

“Along with some escorts. Which means either the trucks have
been hijacked or your pal Ibby was waiting for them to escort him to the promised land.”

“Please stop saying ‘your pal Ibby’ like that. It’s demeaning to him.”

“Boy, he’s got you sold, doesn’t he?”

“Wait until you meet him,” she said. “He’s something you just don’t see anymore: a real, honest-to-God leader.”

Joe said, “If we’ve seen them, they’ve seen us. Now we need to figure out what we’re going to do.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Jan said with confidence.

“Who?”

“Ibby, of course.”

“So you think he’s in this with them? That he’s in one of the trucks coming right toward us?”

Joe shook his head as he drove. Parker’s pickup was so shot-up it wouldn’t go more than twenty miles an hour. The oil pressure gauge had dropped into the dead zone and the needle on the temperature gauge was well into the red. If he turned and retreated, he’d lose a chase in minutes. And if he stopped, the engine might not start up again.

“What if Ibby isn’t with them?” Joe said. “What if they’ve taken his weapons from him and they’re on their own now?”

“Then they’ll probably kill us,” she said. “After all, they killed Phil for no good reason. They don’t want us to report them.”

“I agree.”

“So what do we do?” There was cold fear in her voice and a good reason for it, he thought. A ball of ice was forming inside his chest and his fingers were going numb on the wheel.

Joe said, “That guy you shot back there didn’t have a radio on him and Phil’s doesn’t work. They don’t know what happened to him. As far as they know, he’s still in this pickup headed back to the ranch with a dead game warden in the back.”

She nodded, waiting for more.

“If they think he’s still driving it, they might give us a pass,” he said.

She said, “We need his black scarf to cover your face.”

“We don’t have it,” Joe said.

“Let me see what I can find,” she said, turning around so she could dig through Parker’s gear on the back bench seat.

Joe continued to drive right at the oncoming convoy. They were a mile away, but closing on him faster than he’d like. There was no doubt they’d seen him and assumed it was their man because the lead truck had not taken any aggressive action. He peered to the right and left through the open windows as if searching for a road he could take that would somehow speed the truck up or hide it.

That kind of road only existed in his imagination, he knew.

“There’s a couple of red shirts,” she said, “but no black scarves.”

“I’m not surprised,” Joe said.

There were more than a dozen armed men coming right toward him, he thought. He was vastly outnumbered and outgunned. Even if he could take out a couple of them before they realized who he was, the rest would overrun him in seconds.

Stopping and begging for mercy seemed out of the question. The men who beheaded Cooter and the grizzly bear wouldn’t even consider it.

“Hey,” she said, “I found something.”

It was a musty black Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey T-shirt that had been balled up on the floor.

“This might be our only chance,” she said. “Here, let’s get that red shirt off . . .”

He continued to drive while she helped him strip off his red shirt to the T-shirt below. She balled up his uniform and threw it behind the seat. Then she turned the Jack Daniel’s T-shirt inside out and pulled it over his head as far as his shoulders. He suddenly couldn’t see as she tugged on it until he was peering through an armhole. It smelled of sweat, alcohol, and Parker’s musky cologne. Joe could imagine Parker wearing it to the bars in Rawlins after he was off duty.

She yanked down on it until the armhole formed into a kind of balaclava opening.

“It might work,” she said, appraising him.

“Maybe,” he said, his voice muffled. “Grab Daisy and get down on the floorboards. We can’t let them see you.”

She understood and nodded quickly. Daisy didn’t mind being engulfed on the floor by her.

“If they want to talk to me, I’ll pretend I don’t hear them,” Joe said. “And if they stop us . . .”

“I know,” she finished for him. “I know.”

•   •   •

J
OE CONTINUED TO DRIVE
. His hands were getting slick on the wheel and his breath came in shallow gasps. Keeping the front tires firmly in the sandy ruts was getting harder to maintain.

When the lead white pickup was fifty yards away, he eased
Parker’s vehicle out into the desert beyond the shoulder of the two-track to give the convoy a wide berth. The driver of the lead truck and his passenger both nodded in his direction as they got close, and Joe nodded back.

The grizzly bear’s huge head was wired to the truck like a bizarre hood ornament. Its thick hair was matted with dried blood and dust, and its tongue lolled out between sharp yellow teeth. Joe fought back the twin emotions of revulsion and gut-churning fear.

The fighters in the back of the pickup had a higher angle on Parker’s truck, but instead of looking inside the cab and possibly seeing Jan and Daisy, they were more interested in the dead game warden in the back. One of them pointed his finger at the body and re-created the act of shooting at it. Another one laughed.

Joe tried not to stare at the drivers of the semitrucks as they rumbled past him.

The two eighteen-wheelers created so much rolling dust that he was able to get by the two trailing white pickups without anyone in them looking at him too closely. He extended his left hand and waved through the dust and a couple of the fighters waved wearily back.

As the third pickup passed, Joe got a glimpse of the bear paws when there was a break in the rolling dust.

“Stay down,” Joe croaked to Jan.

“Okay.”

•   •   •

A
FTER THE
CONVOY HAD PASSED
, he eased Parker’s pickup back onto the two-track. His heart was still beating so hard he was surprised she couldn’t hear it.

He watched the convoy get farther away through his rearview mirror. After two minutes, he said, “I think we did it.”

“Can I come up now?” Jan asked.

“Yup.”

She crawled back onto the front seat, and Daisy came with her and sat between them.

“That was way too close,” he said. He was suddenly very tired. The adrenaline rush he’d felt as the convoy went by was receding into dread.

“I can’t believe the T-shirt worked,” she said a few minutes later. “You’ll probably want to wear that for the rest of your life. It’s your lucky T-shirt.”

“It didn’t work for Phil,” he said, peeling it off.

“Did you see Ibby?” she asked.

“Maybe. There were a lot of guys. I don’t know what he looks like.”

“Fuck.”

“Describe him to me,” Joe said.

She looked at him suspiciously, then said, “Tall, dark, and handsome. Intelligent and refined.”

“Age?”

“Late twenties, early thirties,” she said while reaching back into her jeans pocket. “Here, I’ve got a photo of us together in San Francisco.”

He expected her to extract a smartphone but instead she pulled out a thin wallet.

“Remember photographs?” she asked. She riffed through some plastic-coated photos and held one out. In it, Jan embraced a sharply handsome man. In the background was the Golden Gate Bridge.

“I can’t say for sure, because most of them wore black masks. But I don’t recognize him from those I saw.”

“They murdered him,” she said.

“We don’t know that.”

“If he wasn’t with them, they murdered him,” she said. “He’d
never
let anyone take those trucks.”

“Sorry.”

She covered her face in her hands and screamed. The sound alarmed Daisy, who looked up at Joe for an explanation.

The scream faded into sobs. “They’re fucking animals,” she said. “They’ve ruined everything. Are you sure you didn’t see him?”

“Ninety-five percent,” Joe said.

“We need to kill them all,” she hissed.

“First things first.”

•   •   •

“L
ISTEN
,” J
AN SAID
. Her eyes were wide with alarm as she reached over and grasped Joe’s shoulder. “They’re coming back to kill us.” Her manner had turned from mourning to anger and now to shock. Her voice was leaden.

He heard it, too. A low rumble.

“That’s not them,” he said.

“Then what is it?”

Before he could answer, a formation of four helicopter gunships appeared over the southern horizon. They were coming fast and appeared to be headed to the dry valley where the old sheep ranch was located.

“It’s the good guys,” Joe said. “Rulon must have come through and let the feds know to send the choppers up from a base in Colorado.”

“Thank God for that,” she said.

“Yup,” he said, and they exchanged a delirious glance.

She started to say something, but her words were drowned out by a tremendous series of high-pitched
whoosh
sounds as missiles were launched from the sides of the choppers.

Joe said, “Good-bye, convoy.”

But instead of watching the first wave of Hellfire missiles scream through the sky overhead, the earth shook from multiple explosions on the dry valley floor.

He thought:
They’re going after the ranch.

Then he thought:
Sheridan
.

•   •   •

T
HE DEST
RUCTION
of the structures on the old ranch was remarkably quick, complete, and devastating.

Joe stopped the pickup on the ridge above the valley and watched swooping helicopters unleash hell on the buildings. He felt dead inside, but he couldn’t look away.

The ground shook with explosions as each of the three big sheds was blown up one after the other. The old ranch house had taken a direct hit and was no more than a smoking crater. Black rolls of smoke and dirt punched up from the desert floor like fists and the old, dry barn wood of the sheds, now simply piles of matchsticks, roared with fire.

•   •   •

A
S SWIFTLY
as they had come, the helicopters rose, turned, and formed into a V, headed south. They were done.

Mission accomplished
.

Joe slumped against the side of the battered pickup for support. He wasn’t sure his legs would hold him up.

His ears rang from the concussions and he almost didn’t hear Jan say aloud, “I wonder if anyone got out.”

Then: “Why, Joe? Why did they destroy the
ranch
?”

He was too numb to speak.

•   •   •

T
HE SHARP SMELL
of the smoke reached them within a minute. Joe turned from it because it made his eyes water. At least, he blamed the smoke.

Before he turned around, he scanned the valley below to the east and west. He’d seen no vehicles, no sign of anyone who might have gotten away from the buildings before they were pulverized.

Jan continued to ask him questions as if he knew the answers to them. Her questions no longer registered and he kept his back to her. He stared north across the vast desert landscape, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling a hard, cold dread ball up in the back of his throat that would likely grow until it enveloped him.

•   •   •

B
ECAUSE OF
J
AN
’
S QUESTIONS
and the ringing in his ears, Joe didn’t hear the rumble of a vehicle approaching or the crunching sound of footsteps.

But when he heard Nate say, “I’ve got Sheridan right here with me,” his head snapped up. His friend said, “But who is going to tell her mom? I don’t think I want to be in
that
room.”

Joe wheeled and flopped his arms across the hood of the
pickup with relief. He needed the support or his legs might have given out.

Oddly, the vision of Sheridan that came to him that instant was from when she was seven years old and all blond hair, missing teeth, gangly arms and legs, and wide green eyes.

But there she was, his twenty-two-year-old college girl. She was climbing out of the back of Nate’s Jeep through a tangle of arms that belonged to two others: her roommate from Laramie, whom Joe had met only once and instantly disliked, and a disheveled woman in her thirties who looked distraught. The woman looked up and waved to Jan, who waved back. They knew each other.

“Dad, I’m so sorry,” Sheridan said, hanging behind Nate as if ashamed to be seen in full.

“You should be.”

“If it weren’t for Nate . . .” she said, stopping to look over her shoulder at the rolls of black smoke rising from where the ranch had been minutes before.

“Thank you for getting her out of there,” Joe said to Nate. Then: “I’ve been looking for both of you.”

“And you found us,” Nate said. “Rather, we found you.”

“What the hell just happened here?”

Nate’s manner was stoic. Joe knew that when Nate was dead calm he was at his most dangerous.

“What happened was four Boeing AH-64E Apache Guardians armed with Hellfire Two air-to-ground missiles,” he said. “They came to wipe everybody out—bad guys, engineers, everyone. We were all supposed to be collateral damage.”

Joe shook his head, puzzled.

“What about the team?” Jan asked the woman who had emerged from the Jeep.

“They got out on the ATVs,” Suzy Gudenkauf said. “Less one volunteer and . . . Ibby.”