Many Moons

Escape

For the second time in a day, Agent Paul Winthrop had helped me escape, this time by not doing anything.

Pushing the emergency bar on the back door of the church, Mona and I ran out into the night. In my hands were keys attached to a piece of white plastic that read, "Marlin Motors Used Car" On the reverse side, in marker, was written "Van #2". There were three white, 15-passenger vans in the parking lot behind the church.

I tossed the keys to Mona. "Try the middle one."

As we ran across the lot there was a loud bang as the doors were thrown open. Apparently some of the congregation were still listening to the minister instead of themselves, and were trying to stop us.

The second loud bang we heard was followed by a whizzing sound, as a bullet shot past us. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the preacher had a gun and was crouched in a squat stance, the nylon blue fabric of his suit stretched tight at the thighs and shoulders. His sleeves were hoisted up to his elbows. Members of the group who had started chasing us took cover.

Another bullet shattered glass on the rear window of the van as Mona unlocked the driver side door.

"Meet me at the intersection." I told her, pointing toward the front of the church a hundred yards away. Before she had time to argue, I started running in the opposite direction, drawing the preacher's attention, and fire, away from Mona.

The property line for the church ran behind the parking lot, and was delineated by a two foot deep, six foot wide gulley used for drainage from when the afternoon rains rolled off the asphalt. It didn't provide a lot of cover, and wasn't really fooling anyone, but it would give me a few seconds to hide from the bullets while planning my escape.

I like to think that I'm a resourceful man, light on my feet, nimble in my mind, and suave with the ladies. Reality is that I'm none of those things. Sure I jog occasionally, and I was suave enough to somehow get Mona to fall in love with me, but when push comes to shove and I'm lying in a ditch about to get shot from an angry mob of religious fanatics who want me to run a device so they can speak to the dead, I'm really at a loss as to how to proceed.

I figured something would come to me.

The only relevant experience I had for dealing with something like this were some little bits of arcane knowledge I had picked up from a high school buddy of mine named Troy Greer. Troy was a cool enough kid but after graduation he started really getting into guns and knives and Chinese throwing stars until finally he opened up a small survivalist training camp in the back yard of his parents house.

Seriously, he had an advertisement in the back of Guns and Ammo and had a write up in Soldier of Fortune magazine.

His parents were almost never home so it wasn't really a big deal to them, although the neighbors in the gated community raised a bit of a stink over it until he finally had to move the operation to a small alligator farm outside of Apopka.

One of the things Troy had taught me was how to Marine-crawl when you were in a trench, pinned down by gunfire. That's what I was doing now, moving east to west, away from the road.

Another thing Troy shared was that if you ever were in a situation where you were in what amounted to a shallow grave, chased by a maniac with a gun, well then brother, you were pretty much fucked.

For lunch we ate potted meat out of a can and reconstituted some dried apricots with our urine. To be clear here, we each reconstituted our own apricots with our own urine. We didn't share or anything. Interesting fact, your own urine isn't really harmful other than it will dehydrate you. It is, however, harmful to other people.

I contemplated trying to pee on the preacher and smiled, but realized that I most likely didn't have that kind of time, nor the ability to get him to hold still since he was running around with a gun.

As if my thinking commanded it, the preacher appeared in the bank of the ditch in front of me.

"Well speak of the devil." I said, standing.

"What?" he asked, panting and pointing his gun.

"Never mind."

"You are going to get the device working. Do you understand me? No excuses."

"I already told you, it won't work."

The preacher aimed the gun at my head. It was then I noticed the insane glint in his eyes. It was the same sort of gleam I supposed most members of the clergy reserved for when they implored sanctity, solicited donations, or molested.

It was the hypocritical gaze of a man who didn't really give a shit if what he was doing was right, just that it was justified along the lines of his particular sensibilities, or lack thereof.

He lowered the gun, and just when I thought I was doing alright, he pulled the trigger.

I don't know if you've ever been shot before. Probably not since statistically very few people ever are. But the three things that struck me were the fact that a gun looks much bigger up close when it's pointed at you, the sound of a gun is much more like a cap gun 'pop' than the sounds guns make on television, and the bullet.

In my leg.

The preacher started talking about how I was going to complete the device and not run away again and how everything would be alright once I finished my task, but to be honest I didn't catch most of it.

I had a sense of people swarming around, as the rest of the church group caught up to us.

I was more concerned, though, with the blood streaming in an arc out of my leg, slightly off tempo from the beating of my heart.

"Oh, shit. You hit an artery." Someone said.

"What?"

"That looks like a lot of blood, Carl" Someone else noted.

"I just shot him in the leg."

"Yeah, but you hit his artery. He's going to bleed out."

"We need to make a tourniquet. Someone call 911."

"The cell phones aren't working, remember?"

"We need to get him to a hospital."

"We need him to fix the device first."

And this was the way it went, on an on, until I fell backwards into the stiff, green grass lining the tiny ravine, into a pool of my own soft, red blood.

I didn't need Mona around to tell me that there was no medical way to fix this. It was too far gone. I thought of Mona as I was bleeding out across the stream bed. Except for the pain in my leg where the bullet went in, dying of exsanguination really wasn't entirely unpleasant. It gave you a few seconds to ponder the things you loved.

The black night sky was breaking in the east. The first tentative rays of morning sunlight washed over me.

It's a bit cliché, but I really did find myself standing at the entrance to a tunnel of white light. It was warm and comforting.

I found myself looking for loved ones who had passed on. My Uncle Will. My grandparents. Lineages long gone whom I had never met. I thought I might hear music. I was sad to go but excited to leave, onto the next part of my soul's journey.

I took a step forward (figuratively, in my mind, because I had a bullet in my leg and was hypovolemic) and then another step. I was at peace. I was coming home at long last.

At least until sense of awe and calm was broken by one of the church members shouting, "Oh my God, is that a UFO?"