Fair Game (The Salt Mine Book 13) by Yee Suzi & Browning Joseph

Author:Yee, Suzi & Browning, Joseph
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Expeditious Retreat Press
Published: 2021-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Falcon Heights, Minnesota, USA

29th of August, 11:05 a.m. (GMT-5)

The pleasant weather drove up opening weekend attendance; warm and sunny was always a welcome respite from the long and harsh Minnesota winters. Newscasters were out in force, repeating some variant of “If it keeps up, we’re in for a record-breaking day here at The Great Minnesota Get-Together!” Regardless of where the smiling reporters framed their shot, there were always children goofing off in the background and distracted elderly visitors oblivious to the cameras.

Morris took off his hat and fanned himself with it. The sun had burned away the clouds and the coolness of the morning had passed. In conjunction with the humidity from all the nearby lakes, it started to remind him of his native Louisiana but with more white people and whole lot more dairy.

He sipped his fresh lemonade and considered his next move. So far, the three groups he’d employed were sticking to their schedule, all part of an organized effort to disrupt the collective fair experience and the subsequent energy that fed the platzgeist. His idea was simple: drain the emotional energy during the day and be gone by night. Give it no quarter and give it no contest.

He believed he could take the platzgeist now, but it was an exercise in futility without the ghosts to prevent it from reforming, especially since the fair had just started. If necessary, he could keep this up until Labor Day—the final day of the fair and the unofficial last day of summer—but he didn’t relish the idea of beating the pavement day after day. The sooner Wilson found the items containing the ghosts, the sooner he could put the platzgeist to bed permanently.

But his strategy wasn’t just to reduce the total energy. He also wanted to change the emotional geography of the fair, damming it in some places and redirecting it along different paths in others, thus the meticulous planning of locations and times. As the bard once wrote, there was method in his madness.

Its purpose was three-fold. First, he needed to give Lieutenant Colonel Haughton some cover and starving the platzgeist was a good start. Second, it made it easier for Morris to detect where the platzgeist was—fewer metaphorical streams and rivers to lose the scent. Last, he was preparing for an inevitable confrontation in what he still referred to as “spiritual warfare,” even if he wouldn’t use such a term around his fellow agents. By slicing off whole sections and bottlenecking others, he was reducing supply lines and cutting off paths of retreat.

The fair was huge, and he had many more circuits to go before that time could come. He took a seat at one of the ever-present benches to rest his feet before the next bout. He tipped his hat at the elderly couple juggling their corndogs and drinks on the next bench over. He pegged them somewhere in their 80s, and they ate in that comfortable silence cultivated over a lifetime together—one of those couples who had said everything so many times over, it didn’t bear repeating.

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