Sneakernet: A John Crane Novella by Mark Parragh

Author:Mark Parragh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Waterhaven Media, LLC

Chapter 16

Crane dreamed of his father. They were standing at his mother’s grave. Crane was somehow outside himself, watching himself as a young boy, awkward in a small, ill-fitting suit and tie. His father stood beside him, his broad shoulders slumped and his head bowed. Crane was watching the scene from behind and from far away, but he heard his father’s voice as if he really were standing beside him, reaching up to lose his hand in his father’s larger hand.

“Even though the actions of godly and wise people are in God’s hands, no one knows whether God will show them favor,” his father said. “Good people receive the same treatment as sinners, and people who make promises to God are treated like people who don’t.”

“What are you telling me?” he heard his child’s voice ask.

“Don’t go to Iceland. It doesn’t matter that you’re doing the right thing. You’ll die there, because God doesn’t care if you do right. And the world won’t care that you ever lived.”

“But I can’t let them get away with it,” Crane heard his child’s voice saying. “If I don’t go, I’ll know.”

“The living at least know they will die,” said his father. “But the dead know nothing.”

Crane heard something else, dimly, faintly. It sounded like pounding, someone pounding as if on the lid of a casket, and then the rising sound of his mother’s screams.

“She knows she’s dead,” Crane said. His father had nothing to say to that.

It was a harsh voice that startled him awake.

Crane bolted upright, tactical drills flashing through his mind. Where were they? How many? Which was the biggest threat? Which should he take down first?

It was a woman’s voice, he realized as his brain caught up with events. She stood in the shelter’s doorway. A rangy woman, in her fifties Crane guessed. A rangy, middle-aged woman with a rifle pointed at him.

She looked down the barrel, focusing the iron sights on his chest, and said something in Icelandic.

“A minute,” said Crane. He held his hands out and blinked. He listened for the helicopter but couldn’t hear it. The woman wore faded jeans over a pair of boots, and a Helly Hansen jacket that was unzipped to reveal a fleece sweatshirt and the untucked tail of a cotton blouse sticking out from beneath. Her hair was gray and unkempt, her skin windblown, her expression steely. A local farm woman, he concluded. And that wasn’t some battered old varmint rifle she was pointing at him, but a Sako 85 Carbonlight. If she’d spent that kind of money on her gun, he assumed she took it seriously and knew how to handle it.

“Do you speak English?” he asked.

“What I said is, so you’re the one they’re after, then,” she replied. “A foreigner. I should have known.”

“I’m not armed,” he said. “I don’t mean any harm.”

“I’ll keep my rifle on you still, I think. You can push that pack over here. Ah! Use your leg.”

Crane shifted around until he could get a foot against the pack and slid it slowly across the dirt floor.

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