The White Mountain by Ernie Lindsey Read Free Book Online Page B

of life in Lakeland’s eyes.  A hand reaching for his leg as he slithered
away.
    He’d never made it.  After a
fierce gunfight, after eliminating the wrong target, he’d been forced to
retreat, and never got the chance to recover the corpse of his friend, his
brother.  The phrase, no, the demand to never leave a man behind followed him to sleep at night, invading his dreams with guilt and shame.
    Randall took another swing of
soda, sighed, and then gave a half-hearted, regretful salute to the memory of
his friend.
    He was tired.  So tired.
    But resuscitation wouldn’t be
coming any time soon.  He had work to do.  There were preparations to be made. 
His house was to become his fortress.
    Randall looked at the clock. 
Mary would be in D.C. by now, chasing down leads that weren’t there, that never
existed in the first place.
    He hated lying to her and was
more than surprised that he’d gotten away with it.  As good as she was, he’d
thought for certain that she’d notice a subtle eye-twitch or an unavoidable
tick that would reveal his attempts at subterfuge, nearly every ounce of it
made up on the spot, bits and pieces stitched together in a patchwork quilt of
lies.  Some of it from plots of novels he’d read, some from movies he’d seen,
and some plucked from the depths of his imagination. 
    Some of it true.
    The real reason he’d sent her
to D.C. was even more unbelievable than his story about the compromising
positions of the politicians in South Korea.  People were hunting him all
right, but not for the reasons he’d told her.
    The inkling of truth out of
the whole thing was that he had fought with some superhumanly fast man
in his front yard, but he had no idea that he’d show up so soon after the
drawing.
    Months, not years, earlier,
over a slew of beers in that Norfolk bar, the German (codename: Enigma) had
said they would get at least a week to prepare after their name had been drawn.
    But, now that Randall had
unknowingly shot his contact point in the chicken coop, he wondered if the
rules had changed, wondered why Enigma had been in southwest Virginia on his
farm in the middle of the night.
    ***
    Randall paced between four
different spots in the attic, each containing a rifle situated firmly on its
mount.  Up here, it was bare bones.  With no insulation or sheetrock covering
the interior and just a few sheets of plywood covering the flooring, it
reminded him of a great, wooden skeleton, or maybe the belly of a schooner.
    It was the only place in the
house open enough to have all four walls facing all four points of the
compass.  Five days ago, when he found out his name was chosen, he’d gone in
one day while Alice and Jesse were out fishing.  He’d cut out holes big enough
to accommodate a sniper rifle and its scope, then climbed onto the roof and
disguised each with a vent cover.  Alice never noticed the new additions—she
wasn’t the most observant person—and if she ever did, he planned to tell her
that it was something he’d read about—a ventilation escape for the heat that
accumulated up there during the summers that could be plugged during the
winter.
    Satisfied that each location
was as ready as it could be, Randall clambered down the thin stairwell and into
the hallway of the second floor, then scurried from bedroom to bedroom checking
that each of the windows were locked and secure.  Not that such a minor
impedance mattered.  If the men coming for him wanted to get in that way, they
could, likely without any kind of warning sound.  To prevent that from
happening, he ran down to the basement where his stockpile of 2x4s laid waiting
for their day to come.  He grabbed as many as he could carry, along with the
nail gun, and hustled back upstairs.  He fixed enough planks over each window
so that they looked like they were guarded by their own oversized and
individualized picket fence.
    He left the downstairs
windows alone and unlocked.  The front and back doors,