Here Be Monsters (Tyler Cunningham) (11 page)

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ADJUSTMENT

Lonesome Bay, 3:14a.m., 9/7/2012

I woke up sore and thinking about a 90 degree wedge of a 12” peach pie. Instead of peach pie, I gobbled a handful of Dorothy's dog drugs and downed one of the Gatorades we had stolen from the backroom fridge. We had cleaned out the fridges in the backroom and office, as well as desks and cupboards, of everything edible in the assumption that we shouldn't drive through town or delay my hiding, like a scared and wounded tiny woodland mammal (
which I was
), from the world in general, and George and his thugs in particular. Dorothy filled a garbage bag with everything edible that we found and helped me back into her little SUV for the short drive out to the plow turnaround from where I could walk out to my campsite.

She got me through the woods and we hung all of the food except the Gatorade for morning. I had a pair of tuna sandwiches and a quart container originally labeled for 2% milk that we had filled with a mix
of whole milk and half and half from the fridges in the TLAS. I'm not a big fan of tuna but I figured that my body could use the protein. By the time I finished the sandwiches and the milk/cream, I was full and tired and needed Dorothy's help to get into my sleeping bag and tip back into the waiting hug of my hammock. Dorothy wanted to call in sick, stay and help, obviously certain that I was either going to die in my sleep or drive over to surrender myself to George in the morning. I assured her that I planned to do neither and told her that she needed to stay alive and safe and working for the good of the homeless beasts in the Tri-Lakes area (
and in case I got shot again, and needed more mending
).

I could hear her stomping angrily through the woods away from my camp long after the light from her headlamp had faded away.
I was asleep before I heard her car start up to bring her home and to bed. After a restful nap, I woke up and felt like hammered shit, but significantly better than I would have felt in a garbage can on the bottom of the lake. So, after washing down the pills and finishing the Gatorade, I pee'd, checked the dressing for leakage (
none
), hobbled back to bed, and went back to sleep for another five hours. I repeated this process in both a boring and painful manner for the next 36 hours or so, waking once when Dorothy came by with some bags of food and drink, and to poke and prod and change the dressing. She said that during another visit, which I don't remember, I had sweat through my clothes and sleeping bag. She had stayed for eight hours slapping on dermal-contact thermometers every 30 minutes until my temp dropped below 100. I felt as though I should worry about her car being parked out on the road for all that time, but since we didn't get shot or dumped in a lake, it didn't seem worth it after the fact.

Lonesome Bay, 4:23p.m., 9/8/2012

I climbed out of the hammock with all of my joints feeling stiff and muscles protesting. My mouth tasted as though a tiny pig had spent the last few days in it, eating chili and cabbage and ex-lax; my sleeping bag smelled like a locker-room. When I stripped off my clothes, the dressing on my shoulder was cleaner than I felt it should have been (
given the state of my body and sleeping bag)
That likely meant I'd had another visit from Dorothy while I slept. I could lift my left arm up to shoulder height before my body yelled at me and things felt as though they might start to fall apart; so I didn't go beyond that point. I hobbled around my campsite, picking up garbage and putting my things back in order. My right pinky was sore, but not throbbing anymore... it was no worse than if I'd caught it in a door now, so I took the tape and splint off and practiced making a fist.

I snuck down to the lakeshore, terrified that I would
see Justin and Barry on George's pontoon boat either looking, or waiting, for me down in the water. There were a number of boats on the water, but none had the right look, and nobody seemed to pay attention, or even notice, when I eased myself into the water to float around for a while. The cold water felt great all over, except for the wounds on my shoulder, where it stung and felt hot and cold and dead/numb in various places and stages. After floating a bit, I tried gently moving my arms and legs, not really swimming, but moving around a bit. Everything seemed crusty and cranky as though all my joints had been lightly coated with some abrasive material while I wasted two days sleeping. I stopped when the bandage came loose and floated away like a white flag on the dark water. Climbing out of the water, the wind stole all of my residual warmth and strength, and by the time I got back up the hill to my camp, I was shivering and stumbling enough to freak myself out a bit.

Dressed in my warmest layers, and fortified by a ginormous serving of oatmeal, I tried to think about the hole I'd dug for myself in the last few days.
It occurred to me that I could just pack everything that would fit into my Element, leave the rest, and drive until I got to the far side of the Rocky Mountains. George wouldn't have sufficient interest in silencing me to reach out across thousands of miles to find me among hundreds of millions of people. Spenser or Travis might have immersed themselves in a grueling montage of workout and rehab and training to prepare themselves for a fair fight with the bad guys assembled against them; I had neither the time, nor the abilities, nor the will to focus on that set of chores (
along with my deeply held belief that fair fights were for idiots
). I needed cash and gear and food to keep living in the woods for a bit longer, while I figured out how to deal with George and the minions
(which sounded like the name of a bad cover band to me for some reason, causing me to painfully snarf a bit of oatmeal
). As I dug out my GPS and set it up to point me towards my nearest supply cache, I got the beginnings of an idea.

I swallowed a handful of the dog drugs and headed off with the GPS and a hydration pack to find a cache that I had hidden last spring about a mile and a quarter southwest of my campsite on Lonesome Bay.
I have a bunch of these caches hidden in the woods around the Tri-Lakes, and a few further out along routes that I've traveled and explored in chunks of wilderness that I've brain-mapped for myself in the last few years. This one (
like most of the others I've put out in the woods
) contained $500 in mixed bills and a roll of quarters, some oatmeal packets and jerky, water purification tablets, an alcohol stove and a bottle of HEET, a map, a GPS receiver, a headlamp, batteries, a Leatherman, a poncho, socks, a skullcap, gloves, and a book (
this one had a copy of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” in it
). I found it without any trouble. For some reason I seem to always place them near a glacial erratic (
I’m inexplicably drawn to those big rocks dropped by a glaciers during the last ice-age… I can’t explic it
). I checked the GPS and map to see where the next closest cache was, and what the easiest route would be to get from where I was to where I wanted to be, when something clicked and my half-formed idea graduated to fully formed. In an instant, I knew a couple of things that I hadn't even a minute ago. One, I was going to stay in the Adirondacks; two, I knew how I was going to deal with Justin and Barry; and three, I'd be on time for dinner on Monday with Frank and Meg... or I would be dead, if things went badly for me (
in which case being late/absent wouldn't matter)
.

I headed back to camp with most of the contents of
the cache stuffed into my hydration pack. I'd left the rest in the now mostly empty 50-cal ammo can that I'd have to restock if I got through this OK. I got back to camp, fed, watered and medicated myself before climbing back into the hammock to read for a few hours to let my back-brain work out the details of the murders that I planned to commit in the coming days.

TLAS, 11:48p.m., 9/8/2012

Chief Bromden smothered McMurphy at about 10:15p.m., and by that point, I knew most of what I had to do. I first read “Cuckoo's Nest” when I was ten, and I get more out of it every time; I tend not to talk too much about my relationship with the book and the characters within it with other people because I relate to them differently than other (
regular?)
people do. In this reading, I found some comfort and guidance in the inevitability of the characters' actions, the victory of chaos, and the cost of that victory. I called Dorothy and asked her to pick me up for a meet at the shelter at 11p.m.. I told her to leave all of the lights off except for the one in the internal office, a room in the center of the building with no windows.

We parked a little past the shelter on Algonquin Avenue, a residential street nearby, and walked through the woods to the shelter from behind. I didn’t want to expose the TLAS or Dorothy to more risk than was necessary to get my plan in motion, although she seemed
to be having fun (
she was humming the theme from, “Mission Impossible” the whole time
). We spent an hour or so using the shelter's ancient desktop computer, with its slow Internet access and an even slower printer, to lay the groundwork for my plan's implementation. Once everything had been double-checked and printed off, I sent a slightly reluctant and confused Dorothy up Panther Mountain with her headlamp, while I made a quick run to Cynthia's house for a needed item. I was back a few minutes before Dorothy (
Panther is both close and teeny, and she must have jogged up and down it
). Once she had hosed off her head in the shelter's grooming sink to cool down, she blocked the door and forced me to explain my plan to her.

“
Give, or you don't get out this door, peewee!” she said as she leaned back against the only exit from the room, air-poking menacingly near my injured shoulder.

“OK, I can tell you some of it, but there are parts that I have to leave out, and others that will develop once the plan is in motion.” This wasn't strictly the truth, but it was hopefully close enough to mollify her, and get me out and moving.
If I spent too long thinking about the complex series of events that all had to shake out in the right way in the next eighteen hours, I might just hike to Smart Pig and drive away in the Element; and I wouldn't like the way that felt.

“I need to break the bad guys into more manageable units, get them out of their comfort zone, and take them off the
game board in a way that won't bounce back on me, and you.” I began, looking to see if she was going to move away from the door... she wasn't... yet. I needed to give her a bit more

“They're comfortable in and around Saranac Lake, Lake Placid, Tupper Lake, and the roads connecting them to each other and the world outside of the Park.
We're going to use the GPS and my knowledge of the wild places around here to get them off their personal maps, and onto mine. I'll bounce them from nook to cranny all over the backwoods around here, both to make sure that they don't bring extra guys, and to keep them off-balance. Once we've gotten sufficiently far from prying eyes, I've got a way to insure that they leave me alone once and for all.”

“Explain how the Ziploc bag and note that I hid at the base of that huge rock on the back of Panther fits in to the master plan?”

“This note and a GPS receiver (
that I got out of my cache a few hours ago
) will be going to George in a little while, and then I'll head out to hide a couple more notes in some increasingly wild spots. The GPS will have coordinates for the note up on Panther programmed into it, and once he gets there, the note you left will give him the coordinates to the next note... and so on. It's like a ransom payoff in reverse... making sure that we control the bad guys instead of the other way around.” She tilted her head like a dog listening hard to an unexpected and confusing noise, so I tried to continue and expand upon my answer. I now wanted to continue not just to appease Dot sufficiently so that she would let me leave, but also to see if my plan made some sense; my last plan for dealing with George had seemed perfectly reasonable to me, and had failed miserably.

“The note that I wrote to him will be dropped off, with the GPS, and it will lead him on a hunt into the woods.
He'll think that he's in a position of power because he has guys and guns, and he thinks I'm injured and alone, which, in fact, I will be; but getting him out of town and away from his internal map of the world will shift the balance of power in my favor, possibly by enough to allow me to win. I plan to strip him of his guys in the early rounds, so that at the end of the game, when just the two of us are left, I've got the upper hand by virtue of my home-court advantage... does that make sense now?” I finished up hopefully.

“Sorta, except that even with them being uncomfortable in the woods, and all, there are more of them than there are of us, and they have guns.”
I smiled at the fact that she had included herself on my team; she had already helped me too much though, and I couldn't bring her along on this next stage, even though I desperately wanted to do just that.

“Just me, Dot, just me.
And their guns won't matter because I'll be ‘
a leaf on the wind
’.” Serenity or Firefly references always seem to make her happy, but in this case it didn't work; perhaps it was a poor choice of quotes.

“Yeah, that worked out great for Wash
... 'watch me-SPLUNK!'... if things go badly, when do I tell Meg's husband?”

“If I don't check back in before dinnertime tomo
rrow then tell Frank if you want, but think about it before you do... it won't help me by that point, and could make things difficult for you on a number of levels. If I don't make this work, then you would be best off just forgetting about it to the greatest degree possible, and move forward. There'll be a crap-ton of money coming to the shelter once my will is settled, more if you find a way to tell Frank where to look for Cynthia.” I had my money set to split mostly between Cyn and Dot, but with Cynthia provably dead, Dorothy and the shelter would get a bunch more.

“Well, that changes things a bit...
I might sign up for George's team, so I can stop hustling for kibble and cat-litter. Dorothy smiled at me in a way that let me know exactly what she thought of my chances of seeing her before dinnertime, or ever again, “But how will he know that you want to play?”

“I've got a burner-phone I picked up from Kinney's when all of this started.
Paid for it with cash and set it up with no useful information in the activation details, I used the Lake Placid McDonald's Wi-Fi. I'm going to head out and drop the GPS and note to George at his mailbox. As soon as I'm clear, I'll call and text him to let him know that I’m alive and that we need to meet, so that I can talk him out of further attempts to kill me.”

“He won't take it at face-value, but might assume that I'm dumb enough to put myself in his crosshairs again, which in some ways is exactly what I'm doing.
Either way, he'll have to play my game. I think it's probable that he'll limit himself to bringing along just Justin and Barry, to keep his circle of who knows what as small as possible.”

“It sounds like a complex way to commit suicide at the end of a nice hike to me, but you're a pretty smart guy, gunshot wound to the contrary...
so I'm just going to wish you good luck, drop you off at your car, and see you later.” She did just that, nobody seemed to be watching my Element, so I waved goodbye to Dorothy and drove off into darkness.