The Brigade by H.A. Covington

Author:H.A. Covington [Covington, H.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781465324986
Publisher: Xlibris
Published: 2008-04-07T07:00:00+00:00

XVI

Things That Go Boom In The Night

Things without all remedy

Should be without regard.

What’s done is done.

Macbeth—Act III, Scene 2

Zack Hatfield got his wish; Kicky McGee was assigned to Third Battalion at least temporarily, since it was felt to be a good idea to get her, Cat Lockhart, and Jimmy Wingo out of Portland for a while. She got to see a lot of the wild countryside up and down the North Coast, which was a new experience for a city girl like her, and to her surprise she began to feel a long dormant connection with nature and the outdoors that she had never experienced before. She made up her mind that if somehow the nightmare ever resolved itself and she was ever again free to do what she wanted, she would leave Portland, and come here to the rockbound coast and the deep, dark forests that rose above the sea.

Lockhart was sent on what amounted to a road tour. The NVA moved him into areas as far north as Bellingham, Washington, as far east as Montana, and on one occasion he did a memorable gig in Vancouver, British Columbia that gained him the signal honor of being declared Canada’s Most Wanted Fugitive by the RCMP and having a special writ of outlawry passed against him by the Parliament in Ottawa, an archaic legal device that allowed anyone, police officer or otherwise, to shoot him on sight. Such an outlawry act had last been used in the Nineteenth Century, against the Indian metis rebels of Louis Riel. Wingo served as Lockhart’s backup, and on his last tour in June, Kicky went with the pair of them. She drove, stood lookout, and otherwise assisted the famed marksman, along with relays of local Volunteers in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene.

During this time Kicky and Jimmy Wingo became lovers, which in the NVA context meant sandwiching occasional sex into the daily roller coaster ride of life on the bounce. It was a natural development and helped her with her transition into her new life. Kicky forced herself to carry out a tremendous act of mental and emotional self discipline, dividing her life into two sections or compartments, Before and After Flanders Street. She never allowed these compartments to overlap in her consciousness, at least not when she could prevent it. Before Flanders Street was before. That was not the person she was today. Now was after, and she was someone else. Memories of Ellie she suppressed with swift brutality every time they surfaced. She knew perfectly well in the back of her mind that this was delusional, that there was still a very good chance that her role as a police informant would somehow come out, and that she would have to die for what she had done. She simply accepted this risk along with the same death she risked every day. In a fractured mutation from one of her old twelve-step programs when she had been trying to quit drugs, she schooled herself to live one day at a time, and she simply didn’t think about the future.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.