After a few minutes of digging, he huffed and armed beads of sweat from a pockmarked forehead, mumbling curse words definitely forbidden by an officer, especially in front of a subordinate.
“Is there something I can help you with, sir?” Jasmine asked while trying to keep the humor out of her voice. She loved the commander, and he loved her, but she was thinking if she started laughing, she might hurt his feelings.
He mumbled, cursed again, and then finally looked up as he replied, “I wanted to show you what things look like outside.” He tossed a thick stack of photos on the table. “Pictures that don’t make the intranet, too gross to make the intranet, and highly censored—” he coughed, “—pictures only shared by high ranking officers and what’s left of our government.”
Jasmine picked up the stack and became wide eyed as she saw what people were doing to each other. In the background, she heard Commander Herne continue, “When we send a platoon, most of them come back… when we send a loner, we never see them again…”
She thumbed through the photos in silence, taking in the inhumane actions. “These are human skulls, aren’t they…?” Jasmine said more to herself than to Commander Herne. “A warning?”
“Yeah, that and scare tactics.” He sat down. “Those skulls are at the Texas-Oklahoma boarder, not far from where your dad and I grew up, the Red River area, and some of those skulls belong to our troops, troops that were sent to police the outer perimeter. When you come out from the Oklahoma underground that’s what you’ll see first… those skulls. Only God knows what else you’ll find.”
“What about the Kansas-Oklahoma border? What will I find?”
Commander Herne grimaced before saying, “The same but much worse. Evidently, they think the Kansas force is harsher than Oklahoma. We do have a larger force. Maybe that’s why.”
Jasmine stared at the pictures one-by-one, committing not the horror but the surroundings to memory. She was thinking that she wanted the lay of the land when, like a prairie dog, she poked her head out of the hole. “Do you have any more?” She asked, finally handing the pictures back. “The maps I have are before the impact. I can’t find any as of late.”
Commander Herne looked at her with sorrow in his eyes and a frown that nearly broke her heart. “Jaz, honey, I’d die if something happens to you—” he cleared away a knot in his throat. “There are really bad people out there, people that will rape you, brutalize you, kill you, then cook and eat you, and I’m not saying this to scare you.”
“I know, Uncle Baul, but someone has to stop that bastard. It’s obvious that we’re failing to stop the drugs from entering the cities so we have to go after the guy who is distributing the drugs, and why in the hell are they calling him the Last Pharmacist.”
Commander Herne stood; his six-foot frame cast a gray shadow over his desk to Jasmine’s hands as if wanting to hide the pictures she was studying.
“I really don’t know the answer to that and I don’t believe anyone does, but what I do know is there have been at least a dozen bounty hunters, trained and untrained, that have gone after the bastard, and that’s just from Kansas. None of them have returned. He has even eluded the Texas Rangers, which I might add is impressive…” He paused. “And Jasmine, some of those men were top notch peace officers. Men who scared the hell outta me. Hell, we even sent a platoon of men who I knew for sure would catch and kill the bastard but he’s as elusive as the frigging wind… None of those guys returned, Jaz. Zero.”
Jasmine stood and paced the small office. “Can you get me maps and pictures of what it looks like out there now? And the last known coordinates of where he’s supposedly located?”
Herne sighed. Sat down and dry washed his face. “I could have you arrested, you know, for disobeying orders.”
“But you won’t,” Jasmine said with a smile. Although a grown woman, and a woman to be feared, she then went to him and sat on his lap buttering him up and digging into his soft spot and pulling on his heartstrings. “I’ve known you all my life, Uncle Baul. And, I know under that gruff is a man I love more than anything else in the world, a man that my parents loved and adored… a man who is my mother’s brother and my father’s best friend… why would you want to stop me?” She kissed him on the cheek, and then hugged him. “I need to stop this, and it’s not just for the bounty… It’s for dad. He would want this… He would let me go.”
Baul knuckled tears from his eyes, coughed again, then said, “I’ll get you anything you want and everything I think you’ll need.” He chuckled. “You’ve been doing this crap since you were two years old. You know Dooriya is gonna kill me when she finds out I’m helping you.”
Jasmine stood and paced the small office again, thinking. She then turned back to Herne and said, “I’ve already spoken to Aunt Doori.” He started to say something. “I didn’t want her to tell you, or influence you. I wanted you to help me on your own.”
“And she’s for it?”
Jasmine nodded. “She suggested the gypsy disguise for only she and God knows why. A premonition, I suppose. She wants me to be the helpless and absent minded gypsy with a deck of tarot cards.”
“Oh, damn. She read your cards, didn’t she?” Jasmine didn’t answer. “The death card?” No answer. “Oh, fuck…”
Chapter 4
“Can I go with you?” Officer Jim Long asked, watching as Jasmine tugged on a vest with two narrow holsters sewn on the inside in the back, one holster on each side. Her grandmother, a ROM Gypsy who migrated up and down the Midwest like a goose in search of a warm place to settle, had worn the vest. The holsters had originally been pockets used to pilfer goods when grandma shoplifted her nightly meals. Her friend, Tank, had altered the vest to not only support the weapons but he also added a thin liner that would help keep her warm.
Beneath the vest was a rawhide leather shirt and to compliment the shirt, Jasmine wore black leather pants with rawhide patches sewn across her ass cheeks, inner thighs, and knees. She wore two pistol holsters and two sheaths that held throwing knives. She then shoved a specially designed semi-automatic Mossberg pistol grip shotgun into the right shoulder holster, and then a specifically designed grenade cannon in the left shoulder holster in the back. Then a semi-automatic Glock in each holster on her sides, and finally she shoved two knives, specially designed for throwing, into the final two sheaths. She then wrapped around her neck and down her chest, two specially designed ammo belts, buckled them, and fastened them to the waist belt that held clips in pouches wrapped around her waist.
She turned. Knelt down a couple of times, and then darted across the room and up the wall before flipping over. She turned to Jim Long and smiled. “Come at me,” she said in a teasing manner.
“I haven’t heard, but has hell frozen over?” Long said in a somewhat jocular manner.
“Come on, silly, I want to make sure I can still move around. This gear is adding a few pounds and the Mossberg and cannon feel a little bulky.”
Long leaped at her and found himself on the floor. He looked up at the smile that he had secretly fallen in love with. A smile that made his day but broke his heart when he saw the pain she was living with every time they found a body wasted by the drugs from the Last Pharmacist. Although he openly voiced his disagreement, he knew he would never be able to stop her. He also knew she wasn’t going to let him go with her.
“Well?” he asked as she pulled him up. “Feel good?”
“Yeah,” she answered with a nod. “Much better than I thought. Remind me to thank Tank when I see him. The man is brilliant at designing clothes and weapons.”