Patriots & Tyrants (Rebels & Lies Trilogy Book 2) (5 page)

The ride to the next
complex in the eight wheeled assault vehicle was uncomfortable, per the usual.
The rebels were forced to take to the back roads, and more often didn’t even
use roads at all, to get from destination to destination to avoid detection.
The terrain underneath the vehicle’s massive wheels jarred the ride up and
down. Kaspar, seated on a bench across from Krys, tried to get comfortable, but
finally gave up. It was just the two of them in the back. Harvey was driving
with Buck in the front seat. The other vehicle, which carried their tents,
medical supplies, and weapons was taking the lead in front. There would be no
sleep on this ride, and not just because of the bumps, either. He was worried
about Krys. Every time he attempted sleep, he would have some nightmare where
he lost her somewhere.

As he looked at her,
she kept moving her eyes from left to right, then back at Kaspar. Even though
they were together, Krys still felt a sense of unease when he would stare at
her. It was nothing personal, she just didn’t like it. Kaspar felt it hard to
not look at her, though. She was a beautiful woman, but his glances now were
not of attraction, though it was still there, but of concern.

“Would you quit that?”
Krys demanded.

“You feeling okay?”
Kaspar wondered in response.

“I’m fine.”

“For now.”

Krys leaned forward,
“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean, those…look,
your body has its limits. You could pass out in the middle of a firefight then
what?”

“You can be a complete
ass sometimes, Ryan.”

Krys folded her arms
across her chest and leaned backwards to rest her back against the side of the
vehicle. Kaspar did the same. They both moved their glances towards the back,
staring at the brown earth the heavy tires dug into. Every time she was faced
with her imminent death, Krys had also come down with a case of bi-polar
disorder. Kaspar could never understand how his trying to make sure she was
feeling okay could piss her off as bad as it did. This forced him to remember
the only truth of her existence: these were her final moments, not his. It was
up to her on how to spend them. If she wanted to spend them lying in some cot,
waiting to die, or fighting for what she believed in, it was her choice.

“Hey,” Kaspar said,
breaking the silence between the two.

“What?”

“It’s just, I’m sorry,
okay? I’m just worried about you…these spells you go under…this whole Goddamn
war. I just want to be with you. You want to run away somewhere?”

Krys grinned. “Turning
chicken shit?”

Kaspar smiled back.
“Maybe…we could go someplace nice. Use our stolen credits on a vacation.”

“We could go to the
beach, live out the rest of our lives in style. I could see the ocean again.”

“That’s right…”

Krys started to laugh.
“You could get a tan on that white skin of yours!”

Kaspar returned with a
laugh. “We’ll have to be careful, though, this white skin will turn red real fast.”

There was another
moment of silence. In the silence, Kaspar imagined what it would be like to be
on some beach somewhere with her. He imagined her in a bathing suit and how
beautiful she would look in one. In the vision, they sat in the same folding
lounge chair with the end of the chair just in front of the surf from the
beach. Kaspar was on the bottom, with Krys lying on top. He moved his hands up
and down her lesion free body and the two just sat, listening to the sound of
the waves crashing in. He felt the warmth of the sun against his skin, he could
sense the smell and taste of the salt from the ocean blue. It was all too
perfect…

“Yeah…it would.” Krys
said before she leaned back and a single tear rolled down her cheek. “We just
can’t.”

Kaspar’s heart sank.
“I know…we have to keep fighting.”

“Ryan?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry if I’ve
been an insufferable bitch to you. I love you and I shouldn’t treat you like
that. This whole dying thing just kind of messes with me, you know?”

“I know,” Kaspar
replied. “But, you’re not going to die. Not yet.”

***

Harvey found it
difficult to concentrate on the path ahead. His strong, weathered hands gripped
the steering wheel as he maneuvered the vehicle up the next small hill. Seated
next to him was Buck. His son sipped on a bottle of fresh, spring water and had
not once looked over to his father during the entire eight hours of the trip so
far. They still had a ways to go and Harvey wondered if his son was going to
say anything at all to him.

“What are you thinking
about, son?” Harvey asked to break the silence.

Buck took a moment to
answer. “I’m trying to think about how I can avoid screwing this up again.”

“You’ll do fine.
You’ve had one actual mission under your belt now. Use that experience to
learn, don’t just beat yourself up over it.”

“That all you care
about? How I’m going to do on the next mission?”

Harvey paused. “Look,
son…”

“My name’s Buck.”

“Okay,
Buck
, I
just want to make sure you’re going to be okay for this mission.”

“I’ll do fine, all
right, just like you said.”

Harvey turned his
attention back to driving. He was going through that battle in his own mind
once again. That battle between what it truly meant to be a good father to
Buck. He never knew what it took to do that. When Harvey was growing up, he
always had a supportive father who raised him right. He was taught how to be a
great American and how to serve his country the right way. But, when things
started to change, he lost contact with his parents.

After Buck was born,
there were complications with his wife’s pregnancy. Harvey tried to deny it to
himself, but the complications killed his late wife, and he always battled the
itch to blame Buck for it. It wasn’t his fault, Harvey knew, but it was still
all too easy to say that if he had never gotten her pregnant, she would have
never died. So, that’s what he did, he shifted the blame from his son unto
himself. The guilt made it difficult for him to be a good father because, deep
down, he wished he was not a father.

Harvey cleared his
throat. “You doing okay, son?”

“Yeah, just swell.”

“Buck, I want to be
there for you, but the road goes both ways, you hear? You shutting me out isn’t
helping matters at all.”

Buck finally looked
over to his father. “I’m not shutting you out.”

“Then, how come you
never, ever, come to me for anything? You never talk about you, what’s going on
with you, how you’re feeling. Nothing.”

“You should know how
I’m doing.
This
is all I do.” Buck moved his open hand all around in a
circle. “I’m just trying to not disappoint you.”

“I know that times are
tough right now, but you’ve got to give it time. Once we are done fighting…once
we can claim some type of victory…”

“You’ve been saying
that for years. Just one more battle, son. We’re almost there, son. It’s
getting old. How am I supposed to connect with you when I don’t know when our
luck is finally going to run out?”

Harvey looked towards
Buck. “Maybe that’s why we should try harder. As long as we are still fighting,
when we don’t know the outcome?”

“Yeah, right. That’s a
great plan.”

It was useless trying
to get through to the boy. Harvey just shook his head and returned to his
silent posture in the driver’s seat. A lot of what Buck had to say was correct,
and Harvey knew it. So, the leftover just did what he knew how to do best. Hide
from it. Pretend like the tension wasn’t there. The hope was always that Buck
would come around to understand, and respect, his father for who he was.

Not being a man who
was good with his own emotions, Harvey found it tough to say that he wasn’t
really fighting for the red, white, and blue. That was just a show he put on
for those who fought with him. No. The truth was, he was fighting for Buck, so
that he could have a better life that what was out there now. The road was
still long and with leftovers only getting older, time was running short. But,
he just knew that there would come some point in his lifetime when the rebels
would have a significant victory in this war.

He just hoped it would
come sooner rather than later.

Sullivan opened the
front door to Mary’s house. He undid the shoulder holster and hung it on the
coat rack to his left. The volume on the TV blared from the living room, to the
point where nobody heard him enter. Through the speakers, Consul Olyphant
talked about how great the USR was and that the public need not fear the
resistance threat. Everything was under control, he said. The more Sullivan
thought about it, the less in control the USR seemed to be. The resistance was
still running rampant out there, destroying USR buildings, and killing Agents.

The investigation into
Reed and his friends had led to nothing after the initial night of
surveillance. Sullivan and his new partner heard nothing but a card game going
on. They obviously had a code of some kind and they did a very good job of
keeping it secret. The truth would come out eventually, Sullivan hoped. One of
them would slip up as they were not experienced in this line of work. They were
factory workers after all. He would have to come up with some type of plan that
didn’t involve Little.

Inside the living room,
Davie’s belly rested on the hardwood floor that had a fresh wax earlier in the
day. His back legs bent straight up, his hands rested underneath his chin, eyes
glued to the TV. He watched with great interest to the nightly press
conference. The living room was full of pictures, family photos, pictures of
Julie and Davie. Conveniently, the pictures with Sullivan had been taken down
and put away.

When he saw his father
walk in, Davie jumped up from his lying position and assaulted Sullivan with a
giant hug around his legs. Sullivan reached down and played with the boy’s
short hair.

“You have a good day?”
Sullivan asked.

“Sure did! It’s better
now that you are here!” Davie replied.

Mary looked up from
the recliner. She had that same look of disappointment on her face that Julie
would give him. When Julie was alive, they never spent much time with Mary and
her husband, Jimmy, who was already in bed. Jimmy worked construction and Mary
stayed at home. After Julie’s death, it became Mary’s job to raise Davie, a job
which Sullivan was reluctant to ask of her. She told him that this wasn’t for
him, but for the boy, and that he needed to find some way to raise Davie the
right way. Raising a child the right way, in this world, that was almost like a
cruel joke.

“Glad to see you grace
us with your presence.” Mary said, turning her attention back to the television
screen.

“Nice to see you, too,
Mary.”

“You taking him home
tonight?”

“I was actually…”

“Fine,” Mary
interrupted. “He can stay here tonight. Again.”

“Thanks.”

There was nothing
harder in this world than looking down at little Davie to see that look of
sadness when he couldn’t come home. Sullivan wanted to take Davie home tonight,
more than anything else, but he needed to plan his next moves to get answers
from Reed. A lot of the time, especially tonight, he questioned whether or not
it was really worth it. Did it really matter how Julie died? Did it really
matter if the USR or the resistance did it?

“Can I please come
home with you?” Davie asked.

Sullivan shook his
head. “You like staying here, right?”

“I do, but I want to
come home.”

“I know you do, but
Daddy’s got work to do, you know that. I’ve got to figure out what happened to
Mommy.”

“I miss Mommy.” Davie
replied.

“I do, too.”

“Where do you think
she is now?”

It took a moment for
Sullivan to come up with an answer. Sullivan knew that she ceased to exist and
there was no afterlife. Only annihilation awaited the dead. It was an awful
thing, he thought, to not believe in anything other than his own existence. One
had to make the best out of what he or she had now and then, when it was all
over, nothing mattered. He thought about Father Francis’s interrogation at
times like these. Those church people he would interrogate seemed to think that
there was a Heaven that all the good people went to.

“She’s up in the sky looking
down on you. She’s so proud of you for being so brave and such a smart boy.”

“Yeah?!”

“That’s right. Why
don’t you watch the TV a little bit more while I talk with your Aunt Mary?”

“Okay!”

Davie ran back over to
the front of the television set and resumed his comfortable posture. Sullivan
felt a sense of guilt for encouraging his son to watch the hatred that went on,
but it wasn’t like there were any kid friendly shows he could watch. Sullivan
turned to Mary and summoned her to the kitchen. She reluctantly stood up from
the recliner and followed him in. At the sight of the shoulder holster, with
the Glock 17 attached, she groaned. They took a seat across from each other at
the red oak table.

“You can’t keep doing
this to him.” Mary said.

Sullivan breathed in
deep. “I know. Don’t you think it doesn’t kill me not to have him all the
time?”

“This is exactly why
Julie wanted to leave you.”

There she went again,
another tirade about how the only reason that Julie never left him in the first
place was because she couldn’t afford it out there, on her own, with a small
child. She loved Davie too much to lose him, because Davie would almost
certainly have ended up with Sullivan. Sullivan placed his opened hand in the
air then moved his index finger to his lips. He didn’t need this, not tonight.

“That boy needs his
father,” Mary continued. “Why do you still ignore your responsibilities?”

“I’m not ignoring
anything,” Sullivan replied, fighting back the urge to raise his voice. “What
I’m doing is for him, can’t you see that?”

“No.”

“Then, you really are
just like your sister.”

Mary slammed her first
on the table. “You don’t talk about her, you hear me, you son of a bitch?”

“That’s not
necessary.”

“She’s gone, William.
We are all trying to move on from it. Maybe I am just like my sister, but at
least I’m not like you.”

“Look,” Sullivan said
as he continued to fight back his temper. “You need to calm down. I told you
before. I’m trying to find out what happened to her, who the parties
responsible were. Things weren’t the greatest…”

“You can say that
again.”

“Listen to me. I know
I screwed up our marriage, I get that. But, even if things were shitty, I still
loved her. That’s why
I
didn’t leave
her
. I want to know what
happened.”

“And, you just ignore
your son, you can live with that?” Mary demanded.

“There are a lot of
things I’ll have to answer for when the time comes. More things than you could
ever imagine. But, I can’t just forget it ever happened.”

“I’ll tell you who was
responsible. It was
them
.”

Sullivan leaned
forward. “Them, huh? Well, they claim that it was the USR.”

“Of course they did!
Why wouldn’t they? They aren’t just going to come right out and admit it. Are
you really that stupid?”

The Agent leaned back
in his chair, shook his head, and then rubbed up and down his face with his
hands. He didn’t need the insults that she continued to throw at him. Mary
never wanted to listen, all she wanted to do was throw every single one of
life’s problems on his shoulders then tell him it was all his fault. Not today,
though. He was not going to deal with it today. What she said was right, he
would have to sacrifice (not ignore) time with Davie. But, when he found out…

“You know, what has
the USR done to correct the problem? Aren’t there still women dying everywhere,
just like Julie?” Sullivan demanded.

“It’s obviously
something that they’ve never seen before. The resistance, they are cunning,
secretive. Who the hell knows what kind of evil concoctions they can come up
with?” Mary replied.

“Did I ever tell you
about the resistance guy who broke into my house and tried to kill me?”

“Yes, you did. You put
your son in danger. Who knows what could have happened?”

Sullivan ignored the
blame. Instead, as he talked, images from that night filled his mind. “He saw
Davie and, I don’t know, he just froze. Like he had some sort of empathy or
something. He could’ve killed me right in front of Davie, but he didn’t.”

Sullivan envisioned
the gun being pointed at his head. The intruder had on a mask that covered his
eyes. He wore an American flag patch on his arm. The Agent demanded to know why
they poisoned Julie. Something that the man said, about Sullivan “not knowing
what was really going on”…then, that telecast by the resistance…

“So, what’s your
point?” Mary demanded, bringing Sullivan back to the present.

“The point is, in my
line of work, Agents would’ve blown me away without hesitation. Wouldn’t matter
who was with me. If they wanted me dead, they just pull the trigger, then go
home to a warm meal and sleep like babies. With all this talk about how great
the USR is and how evil the resistance is…I don’t know. I always go back to
that moment.”

Mary’s stare turned
ice cold. “You’re letting that propaganda piece by those filthy people cloud
your thinking.”

“Am I? Can’t you just
think outside the box for just one minute?”

“I’m not saying
anymore. The last thing I need is for Agents to pour through this door. Now, if
you are going to continue your hate mongering, you can leave. You’re going to
leave Davie here, anyway. He’s the only Sullivan that’s welcome in my house
right now.”

Sullivan said nothing
more. He got his things and left Davie behind for another night.