Claire Randall Fraser - Don't be nervous. Just because this is my final story in this series, doesn't mean I'm going to kill off too many people.
DarylDixon'sLover - I agree. I hope Carol escapes and gets home in time.
You'reMyKindOfTrouble - You're not terrible at all! I'm just glad you're still enjoying the story!
Guest - Cash kind of sways back and forth with me, between being a loveable idiot to being an annoying ass.
itsi3 - This will be nine days. But it's been two days since Grace has been unable to feed the babies, and one day since they ran out of formula for them. If that's what you were asking. Thanks for the review!
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Chapter Thirty-Four: Highwayman
**The Lieutenant**
"I'm a Marine, trained recon, rifleman. I was born, Lake Charles, Louisiana, February ninth nineteen-seventy to a woman who, at that time worked at a small roadside diner called 'The Blackened Catfish'. My father was a known scoundrel in the area, troublemaker mostly, at the time he was a flyshit thief and liar, fought men in the bars all across Southern Louisiana.
One night, my mama was closing up the diner, it was summertime. Hot down on the bayou, the stars must have been out because I've always been lucky. Old Voodoo Queen who lived down the road from me used to say a baby conceived on a starry night will be lucky.
From what I understand, from the stories told me by my Mamere, what little I could eke out of her, my mama drove an old beat up Ford Galaxie. Sixty-two, I believe the year of the model was, faded blue so that it looked like a powdered baby blue car.
My mama, she climbed into her car, she was a friendly thing back then, rape wasn't really on the rise, not like it is now where women have to take every precaution against the hungry wolves that roam these lands, no. Mama got into her car, and rolled down the window for a handsome, tall man who was approaching her.
I can't ever know what was said, whether he asked her for a ride or whether he asked for a light, but that parking lot of The Blackened Catfish is where he hopped into her Ford and somehow they drove off into the starry Louisiana night.
No one ever said anything more about what happened, other than my Mamere once saying 'he done ripped her soul out'.
Since that moment, when my defan Mamere murmured those words, I knew I was the son of the beast, the terror that stalked the night. I was something wrenched from hell itself and my sole task in life was to serve as a torturous reminder to my sweet, gentle mother.
My mama was no classic movie starlet, she wasn't devastatingly gorgeous, but she was pretty. Prettiest woman I have ever seen. Like a small bird or a mouse, even.
And they caged her when I turned four.
They locked her away for her health, because three days after my fourth birthday, my Mamere said I had walked into her bedroom and found my mother choking on her own vomit…she had taken something, pills or some such.
After that I only ever saw her at Christmas and on her birthday.
I don't think she ever really wanted to see me, though. She never said so, mama's no matter how bad they are, never really want to tell their babies that they can't bear to look at them.
I never blamed her. Imagine the worst day of your entire life and having to go around with a constant reminder of it, holding your hand and trying to hug you about the middle.
My grandparents decided, after mama was holed away, to move up the bayou. Basile, they had said, was where your Great-Aunt Ethel lived.
Old Ethel was a mean old cur. Used to poke me in the back with her cane in order to boss me around. I remember her faded floral dresses and the flabby bits under her arms, how low they hung. Always thought if she tried hard enough, she could get some air under those bits and go wind sailing.
She died when I turned eight.
It was strange, never liked the woman, but I missed her when she was gone. I think it was because she treated me like she treated everyone else.
People sort of handled me delicately as a boy. I guess it was because they knew I wasn't born of anything pure and good.
My Papere, defan vieux, he passed when I was fourteen.
Papere was a quiet man, patient and gentle. He had these big hands that were always rough from hard work, used to always be tinkering at something. I used to curl up in his lap in the evenings when I was a wee boy and he'd hold me and sing softly with the radio. Used to listen to the old Spirituals and gospel songs, the bare roots of our warm and pained southern music. He used to sing things like:
There's a land that is fairer than day
And by faith we can see it afar
For the Father waits over the way
To prepare us a dwelling place there
The vieux used to always somehow calm me. He had an aura of tranquillity. I always thought that if Jesus were real, if all that stories from the bible nonsense was true, then he'd be like my Papere. Calming.
Anyways, I turned fourteen and two months later that dear old man, he died. His heart gave out, they said. He was just gone.
And then it was me and my Mamere and we got on well. She used to collect honey and sell it to make money, and when I got old enough I got me a job in Basile at the hardware store.
So, I turn nineteen, in the winter of eighty-nine, and I was New Orleans, working at a bar called the Rusty Tap and I meet this cute little barmaid named Elise. Prettiest little thing, so delicate and small I feel like I could have just put her in my pocket. Dimples when she smiled, skin the colour of…well, you know that song 'Lady Marmalade'? Skin the colour of café au lait. That was her. My Elise.
I wasn't happy with bartending. Just tossing drunks out on their ears, so I joined up with the Marine Corps Reserves firstly, the ones based out of New Orleans. I did my training and then at the end of it all, they asked me if I wanted to join up full force.
That was the summer, ninety-one, that my Mamere died and Elise and I moved to Columbus, Georgia, I took up station at Fort Benning. Served the Corps five solid years, never got around to marrying my Elise. She…she was very quiet and patient with me, but I never got over the fact that my father was a monster and I was – in fact – the product of hell.
She killed herself, fall of ninety-five.
Took an electrical cord into the bathroom and…strung herself up from the door.
See? A product of hate and violence can never be anything good for anyone. I should have known that, I should never have forgotten that. If, maybe I finally got around to marrying Elise, maybe she wouldn't have been so lost.
Ninety-eight I was a Drill Instructor, specializing on the firing range, training the new recruits to use their rifles properly. I threw myself into my work, didn't look up, didn't take a break, didn't do anything but work and sleep and eat.
And then our country is attacked, brutally and lives are scattered on the winds, and change comes to our front door and I request to be sent over. I rather preferred it. Maybe I wanted to die, or…some part of me wanted nothing more than to just destroy this evil heart of mine. This monster that I am.
I served four tours, and then one day we were all being pulled out. Rapidly.
The plane ride over, no one knew why we were pulling out, but we knew that something was happening back home. And we get off the plane, get shuttled to Fort Benning and…I've seen a lot of horror films in my life. You see enough blue painted extras drooling and shuffling in a mall to think it's impossible. You tell yourself it's impossible.
But then you get your pack stuffed full of ammo and shoved out into the wide world and told to take down anyone who looks dead and…you follow orders, because you're still a Marine then.
Men die, HQ is full of them, suddenly everywhere you look it's the dead and there's nothing coming from anyone over the radio and all at once I found myself alone. Walking among them, picking them off when I could.
What is it? Twenty-fourteen? Twenty-fifteen? Shit I don't know.
But here I am. In the asshole of the country, talking to a smug pipsqueak, who, frankly is beginning to wear on my nerves."
The man across the table from him eased back in his chair with a smile. "Lieutenant, if they gave out Nobel Peace Prize's for being skilled raconteurs, you'd most certainly win. And you didn't even answer my question."
The Lieutenant adjusted his position at the table. "I'm sorry, could you repeat the question?"
"Is he always this grating, Carol?" Major Devlin addressed the woman beside him easily.
She remained quiet, still. Eyes glaring hard at the man across the table, almost challenging him.
Noticing this resistance, the Lieutenant continued to play his part. Bumbling idiot.
"You know the land we're sitting on right now used to be Seminole land," he began.
"Stop, just please God stop," Devlin rubbed at his eyes wearily. "Look, just stop."
"You know the Seminole tell a story about how man was created. You see, a long, long time ago, in a valley bordering on a river, God scattered seeds about him. After some time, human fingers began springing from the soil, and, following the fingers, came the bodies. Soon, the people emerged from the ground and began walking about. When they went to the river to bathe off the dirt, some of them remained in the water too long-"
"I asked if you wanted to meet with the President before we go any further," the Major broke in.
"Why are we here?" Carol suddenly demanded.
"You've been asking too many questions, I told you."
"What questions have I been asking?" She inquired.
"All of the wrong ones and none of the right ones."
Carol fell silent, going back to quietly staring the man down.
Licking his bottom lip, Fate stepped in again.
"Think you lost her again," he pointed out.
Devlin frowned. "That's too bad. I really thought I gotten through to her."
"Did you now?"
Sighing a little, Devlin sat back in his chair, throwing his elbow over the back of it and angling his head to the soldiers standing guard behind him. "Why don't you two go and search their room?"
After a moment of the soldiers leaving, in the silence of the door closing behind them and locking, no one said anything, Devlin just sat with his elbow hooked over the back of his chair, an expectant look on his face.
He pinched the bridge of his nose with his unhooked hand and murmured, "you're giving me a headache, Carol."
"You're an ass, Devlin!" She snapped back.
Having never heard anything so sharp from the woman, Fate had to sit back in his seat and just appreciate her tone.
The man smiled. "Okay, let me spell this out for the both of you. A-S-K T-O S-P-E-A-K the president!"
Carol and the Lieutenant exchanged a small glance.
"What now?" He asked for her.
"Oh God, I forgot we're in the South," Devlin sighed. "Y'all can't read them book thangs, huh?" He mocked.
Before those final pillars of the Southern society could respond to this insult, the Major went on.
"When those men come back, you ask very pointedly to speak to the president!"
Everyone was quiet, processing his orders, before Carol spoke carefully. "Why?"
"Oh, come on! We're not idiots here, we may be mostly boys and girls who have more muscle than brains, but we're not idiots. There's a supposed president, our president giving us orders, but never letting us meet him? Your boy Kravitz? He's there in that office every morning and every evening trying to get in to see the president. The Major-General, knocked the secretary on her ass trying to get in, they needed four men just to restrain him from marching past that little harpy in pink. We're all thinking it, no one wants to say it. You two need to be the ones to draw attention to this flaw in our small, private society."
"You don't think there's a president?" Carol asked.
"I don't know who's at the top giving us orders, but I don't think it's the President of the United States of goddamned America. I mean, come on, Florida?"
As the Lieutenant and Carol processed this information, Devlin added, leaning in over the table towards them conspiratorially. "Look, there is only one pillar holding us up right now. That's the fact that we're serving our president and in essence our country. You two want to go home? That's fine, I don't care, but you aren't walking out the gate. The only thing to do is knock that pillar down, collapse it all and escape in the anarchy that ensues."
"How can we trust you?" Carol asked.
"You can't, in fact I'd highly recommend against it normally. I'm using you both to get this shit in the open, but we can live a symbiotic relationship here. You feed my needs and I fuel yours."
Again silence towered over the three at the table, before Carol spoke.
"You said something about 'bodies' to me that night at the bar tent…?"
Devlin nodded. "Orders came down, a week after I arrived. We had just caught this group of men, criminals mostly, interested in death and destruction, loving the violence. So we went in as a force, captured them, took them into custody. The prez sends word, straight from the mouth of his sweet little secretary. We execute those men, make them an example, but we don't burn the dead. We take them out, to the countryside somewhere far away from Florida and we bury them in a pit, moving around or not. So we load them into a dump truck, some of them already getting up and shuffling about, and we drive them into Georgia, dig a pit and drop them in."
"Why?"
"I don't think," Devlin began, pausing after a moment. "I don't think whoever's giving the orders, wants anyone to survive out there. The more groups who die, who drop off, the more resources available to us. The Major-General, as punishment for knocking about the secretary, got put on the duty of tracking down other groups, apprehending them or just wiping them out. It's easier for us, I think, to just let loose the dead."
"So, you're all just running on blind faith that you're serving a president," Carol said.
Devlin sat back with his eyebrows raised. "You serve in any of the Armed Forces, Carol, you tend to just follow orders. As long as whoever is giving them is legit, you do it. Without question."
"But you're questioning it," she pointed out.
"Job I do," Devlin said, "I question everything."
"You're Military Intelligence," the Lieutenant drawled.
"I'm a fact finder, that's all," Devlin replied. "I deal in information and hard evidence."
"Military Intelligence," the Lieutenant muttered to Carol.
She was too deep in thought to hear him. "If we do this, what guarantees can you offer us?"
"Nothing," Devlin returned. "I can't give you anything, Carol. Only information. But you're a hard ass, you'll survive."
"So? We're all clear then? You know what to do now?" Devlin demanded.
Carol nodded once, before leaning towards him, finger pointing at his face. "We'll play along, but if you screw us over, I will find you and I will tear that lying tongue of yours right out of your lying hole."
Devlin blinked at her approaching finger. "Keep talking dirty, Carol, you're getting me all rigid," he said calmly.