Chapter 369: Returning Home; Part One: It Wasn't Easy

Saturday, June 9, 2007

After my one and a half hours sleep, I extracted myself from my tightly clinging wives and went for an enjoyable walk in the woods. Partly to make sure we were alone, but mostly just for the pleasure of it. We were in a very natural area so surrounded by lots of good quality flora and fauna. I'd learned a great deal about Oregon's natural life as a result of Ron and Ava's mini-National Park on the west side of our property. Where I was now was higher and with a much wetter climate, but I very much appreciated its unspoiled nature.

I can see better at night than you can in daylight, I can zoom my two sight blobs 400-odd feet in any direction to observe animals that'd never let humans near them or are normally invisibly high in the trees, I can sneak along noiselessly by floating inches above the ground, my proximity sense picks up almost every lifeform within 24 feet of me that's large enough to have much of a mind (birds, mice and anything larger), and I can use EKP to hold it placid if I want. With all of those advantages, I'm a SUPERB woodsman. Eat your heart out, Daniel Boone.

After a happy walk, I headed back to the cabin at dawn, accompanied by a few of my new friends: a gorgeous cougar, a larger black bear, some deer including a couple very cute Bambi-equivalents, some coyotes, squirrels and a couple of owls. Snakes I left behind. I parked my little menagerie outside the cabin and went inside to start making breakfast for everyone. Camp cooking is REALLY easy for me. (Think about it, you'll be amazed what my abilities allow me to do.)

The smell of food, sunlight, and the dawn birdsong soon woke everybody up. The hard floor probably helped too. When Donna bounced up, I said, "Donna, there are a couple of nice animals outside that you might want to have a look at."

"Okay." She went out the door at her usual speed.

"EEK!" as Donna leaped back into the cabin at considerably more than her usual speed, as I had the black bear and cougar sitting near the front door, facing it.

"It's all right, Donna. I've got control of them."

I led the way outside. It took a while to get the humans calmed down enough to enjoy the experience, and I had to put up with Donna hitting me on the arm for scaring her so much, which I deserved, but soon everyone was happily admiring the animals.

Donna wanted to know if we could keep the cougar. Or failing that (because that request did fail) could she go for a ride on the bear. That request got the same answer from the same mother.

Vanessa said, "When we get back we should talk about this happening. Not that Mark made it happen, but that we woke up this morning and these animals were sitting here like this, and we came out and visited with them. It'll distract people from the death and mayhem, remind them of what happened around Archangel Michael - which was WONDERFULLY effective PR - and make them think the Guardian Angel is a Good soul."

"I like it," I agreed, also for the additional reason that it'd serve as a small introduction to the Guardian Angel starting to interact with us in non-protective ways. Eventually it'll be able to fetch my forgotten jackets from restaurants and fly me and my girlfriends around the country during daylight.

It's quite an amazing thrill to be so close to animals as powerful as a fully grown cougar and bear, so it took a while for everyone to get enough of them, especially Donna, but eventually breakfast won the day.

We went inside where I reheated breakfast while Mom warned Donna, "Don't play with wild animals unless Mark says it's safe!" Donna rolled her eyes.

We got busy eating our food. I released the animals a species at a time, keeping the carnivores to last.

Listening to the radio during breakfast, I was surprised to learn that all-news radio stations are a good source of news. I'd expected the lack of visuals to be a serious deficit because there was no pictures of a scene, no body language cues, etc. But in many ways it was better than TV because its news stories were mostly designed to inform, whereas on TV they're mostly to hook and entertain.

A night without attacks from the Guardian Angel had confirmed what the public had suspected when it'd gone to bed last night: that it was all over. The Guardian Angel had delivered its warning, had inflicted its punishment on the perpetrators of the inexplicably stupid assassination attempt, and was now presumably going to wait and see if the Government did anything stupid again. The public was REALLY hoping that the Government didn't!

I liked to think that the Washington-based Government decision makers, especially in the FBI, CIA, NSA and every other nasty organization, hoped so too. It was hard to imagine that they'd agree to do anything against our family ever again, knowing that all of their friends and family could be atomized. The angel didn't have any W80s any more, but they should be smart enough not to rely on that.

Washingtonians had a three-hour start on the day compared to us, so they'd gotten past the "Thank God nothing happened" reaction and were now discussing less immediate issues. Things like "What is the nature of the angel?" According to its last email, its stealing the nukes had apparently been intended to teach the Washingtonians what it felt like to live with the fear of "undeserved death-at-any-moment," a lesson they'd learned very well. The latest email also implied the previous one's promise to blow up 1, 2 or 4 W80s had been a trick, or maybe even a lie. Are angels allowed to lie?

It was pointed out, to no one's enjoyment, "The first email might not be a lie. If someone kills Mark Anderson, the angel might set off four W80s. It could take more of them off the Air Force, or maybe it could make its own bombs. It implied it could do that when it said, 'You would not believe I could create such effects.' The FBI would be crazy to rely on the hope that the angel can't keep its word. From what we've learned about angels since Archangel Michael appeared in LA, I'd say they seem very good at keeping their word."

That the Guardian Angel had deliberately and brutally killed was discussed too. It'd killed the skinheads outside our property's gates, which had certainly shocked many people, but that didn't have the same impact that killing two such important people had. Nobody felt personally threatened by my killing the skinheads because everybody else considered themselves better than those scum. But my killing two very prominent men meant ordinary people were not safe from the same treatment. The Guardian Angel would, it now seemed obvious, kill anyone to perform its job.

The Guardian Angel had warned the American people that they were now responsible for the acts of their Government, and that was a VERY uncomfortable feeling! The Government had an awful track record of screwing things up in general and repeatedly attacking the Andersons in particular, and the Government had also been totally unable to stop the angel doing whatever it wanted. It was a worrying situation and there were calls for "Someone to do something to ensure the Andersons will be left alone." People were very anxious about that because no one had yet given them a reason why the Government kept attacking the Andersons. MANY people wanted to know that and were demanding to be told, but the Government wasn't saying anything sensible or believable, which made it even harder to have faith that the Government wouldn't try to attack the Andersons yet again.

The language structure of the two Guardian Angel emails received comments. People were confused by that, especially by the grammar getting worse. The second email was "almost alien", suggested some people. It was a very confusing situation, because maybe God, Archangel Michael, the unnamed angel that did the resurrection, and the Guardian Angel, were all aliens who were using humanity's beliefs as a smokescreen? Or maybe God really is God, but the angels are aliens? Or maybe just Guardian Angels are alien? Or maybe God has always been God but is also an alien? There were some very confusing questions and no way to get answers. (In case you're curious, I'd used such bad grammar in the latest email just to be confusing. I liked how well that works. That no one could work out why the UAV had targeted my parents, for example, was fueling a seemingly endless debate; "debate" meaning "screaming accusations" because that's how politics works.)

Further confusing the "It's an Alien" theory was that no one could suggest a sensible motive for why aliens would do what had been done. For example, the Guardian Angel had given the nukes back, presuming it'd returned the real ones, so stealing our weapons didn't seem to be a likely explanation. That Mark Anderson had been resurrected was also a major indicator of Godliness, again presuming that wasn't a fake. Which it did actually appear to be - a white boy's soul swapped into a Black guy's body, gimme a break! - but incompetent con jobs had never before been followed by unstoppable, overwhelming attacks on multiple USAF bases. It was a very confused situation, although there was absolutely no confusion about whether it'd be a good or bad idea to upset the Guardian Angel again.

I'd done the cooking so I got let off the dishes, although there were fewer of them than normal even for camp cooking. The girls did those, while we all discussed what to do next.

There were quite a few possibilities for our return home, so the conversation took a while, but by 8:30am we'd decided.

We packed up our gear, leaving our non-perishable food in the cabin. Just in case something messy happens at home which requires me to prove I'd been at the cabin, I borrowed a blank page out of one of the girl's school pads and wrote a note thanking the cabin owner for the use of his cabin, apologized for not asking him first, and told him we'd left our spare food for him. I didn't sign it or name who we were as we preferred people to know as little as possible about our movements, but the handwriting and fingerprints would match if we asked for them to be tested in the event that I needed to establish an alibi.

I floated us down to the car, removed the trees covering it, loaded us up, and we floated east down the valley.

I flew us at treetop level while there was nothing but trees under us, then at ground level when I could do so. We were still flying, as the ground was undriveable, but staying low made it harder for anyone in the area to see us, and from a distance it might look reasonable. I chose a route out of the hills that avoided all signs of population, until we were low enough that I could see a usable road. Then Dad started the car and took over the driving; my job being using sight blobs to scout for trouble.

We picked up the interstate near Roseburg, then headed north. We turned off I-5 and onto 99W at Eugene, because that gave us more options if my overwatch sight blob saw any trouble ahead of us.

Several miles south of Corvallis my blob noticed a late-model car parked a few yards behind some bushes. It was in a spot where the two young men in it were getting good looks at the north-bound cars, which they were observing very intently. I got Dad to pull over to the shoulder and advance slowly.

When we were closer, I could see their car had a law enforcement radio. They had some paperwork with them but I couldn't open it up without their seeing it happen. We backtracked a bit, headed west, then turned north onto Bellfountain Road, which ran into the west side of Corvallis. It'd add a few minutes to the trip, but we weren't in a hurry anyway.

Bellfountain had another pair of observers parked over the crest of a hill, so I got Dad to park while I walked through cover to get close enough to investigate properly. I used a stone to tap on their back bumper and when one of them got out to check what was causing the sound, I was able to open the file for some quick looks. Our photos, the details of the SUV we were in, and orders from the Portland office of the Secret Service to report any sighting of us but do nothing else.

#5: <We haven't had a run-in with the Secret Service yet, so I guess it's their turn. What do we do?>

#19: <If we give the Government an inch, they'll take a mile, and then they'll take everything else. We have to draw very firm line of NO surveillance so let's give the boss who signed that order a bad day and a good reason not to sign any more orders involving us. We should do it publicly so the public start shitting bricks and screaming at the Secret Service for risking a nuclear response.>

I walked back to the SUV and told my families what the folder had contained, and an expanded version of what I had in mind. They more or less agreed. We discussed it a bit, they added a couple of tweaks, Donna laughed at how stupid the Government was - which earned her a quick reprimand from Mom because Mom didn't think anything that was happening was a laughing matter - and we drove back to Eugene to find a motorcycle for me.

I eventually found a place that met all my criteria. It looked like the guy had taken his car to work, leaving his motorcycle in his garage for me. The property was secluded enough for me to get into without neighbors seeing me, some sight blob searching found his helmet and leathers, which were conveniently larger than me, and some more searching eventually found his spare bike key. The helmet had a transparent visor, unlike the very nice tinted ones I'd been using recently. I found a dark T-shirt of his in the house and used NP to press that flat on the inside of the visor. From the other side it looked like a darkly tinted visor. His leather jacket was very distinctively colored which wasn't ideal, but a nearby house had a bland looking raincoat that I borrowed and put over the top. I didn't want the bike's owner to recognize his leathers and bike if he got a glimpse of me on the news later today.

I left my families in a good spot to wait for me while I went idling rapidly north on yet another motorcycle. It's just over a hundred miles to Portland, so it wouldn't take long. I hadn't been to the Homeland Security building in Portland for a while, but I hoped the Secret Service office was still in it, because that'd give me a good opportunity to address some bad memories (the Secret Service is a division of the DHS now).

As I passed the first surveillance car I'd spotted, I distracted them sufficiently then stole their file, tucking it into my jacket as I continued to roll past.

I drove north on I-5 past the Corvallis turnoff, finding another SS surveillance car just south of Salem. I distracted them and stole just the page that had their orders.

Just before I arrived in Portland, I picked some trash out of a bin, making a rough package that appeared to be tied to the back of my bike. It had a few loose ends protruding from it, one of which covered the bike's license plate.

When I arrived in Portland I rode to near the DHS office. I sent a sight blob in when I was a block away. I was very happy to find the small Secret Service office where I remembered it. It wasn't a big operation - they would have needed to borrow some of the manpower for the teams observing all the roads leading to Corvallis - but however big the Portland SS division was, it was about to get downsized. That was a consequence of the image that the Guardian Angel had established for itself. It can't just slap the Secret Service over the knuckles; it has to do something dramatic, and there was no time like the present for that.

I was riding my bike in traffic so I had only one sight blob available for snooping. I moved it into the office of the local boss of the Secret Service, he being the guy whose name was on the bottom of the orders I had in my jacket. I positioned the sight blob immediately in front of him as he did his paperwork, and then turned it into a visible Guardian Angel. I gave him half a second to appreciate his situation, then I grabbed him roughly and lifted him out of his seat. I pushed his top-floor window in (there were people outside, so exploding the windows outward would've been bad), and then carried him screaming and kicking out into the fresh air.

His secretary rushed in, blanched, then rushed out.

I left him dangling about twenty feet outside his window, WAY too high in the air for his comfort. I used my sight blob to get the big boss - the DHS senior man for Oregon - from his fancy office, giving him the same treatment. I presumed he was the first guy's boss. I moved the big boss to be beside the Secret Service boss, making a mental note to look at them more often than every thirty two seconds or they'd be having a worse day than I intended. I obtained a state road map and a pen, flying them out to be near the SS boss.

Then the Guardian Angel started moving around the Secret Service offices, wrecking them and causing much screaming. It got shot quite a few times, but it didn't give a shit, for a variety of reasons. Alarms were going off and people on the street were turning to look at the yelling, hovering pair of senior agents or managers (or whatever they get called at that pay level), which gave me an excuse to stop my bike on the side of the street and use both sight blobs to manage the Guardian Angel.

When I'd sufficiently expressed my displeasure at the Secret Service's office, I took a moment to find the building's sprinkler system and ruined it, then the Guardian Angel hit one of the "Fire Alarm" buttons.

The Guardian Angels - two of them acting as sight blobs - spent a couple of minutes rampaging around the entire building, smashing and throwing stuff, and generally encouraging people to evacuate as rapidly as possible. I was very effective at that, judging by the evacuees' haste. I particularly enjoyed trashing the areas Moran had operated out of. Then - because I'm a truthful sort of guy and I had triggered the fire alarm after all - I began setting fires throughout the building, in several places on every floor because I was feeling particularly truthful. Then I searched the building for people who weren't evacuating the way they should. There weren't many Christians so it didn't take me long to evacuate all of them out through windows I imploded for them. I placed the evacuees on the street among their intelligent coworkers.

The Guardian Angels had been buzzing around inside and outside, drawing attention to the hovering men, and generally attracting a large crowd of spectators. Seeing and hearing evacuees being flown out of the windows and down to the ground got a lot of attention too.

I finished searching the building, including checking the locked cells in the basement and the parking garage, which were empty. It was embarrassing and amusing how easy it was now to search through the entire building, compared to when I'd been locked up here. It was a strong lesson about how powerfully limiting expectations can be. The building was empty now. There were real fires and Guardian Angels, so most people hadn't wasted any time fleeing, especially after shooting didn't work.

The first couple of fire trucks arrived, screaming to a halt and the firemen leaping out. Their normal fire-fighting procedure was interrupted by all the firemen being gently picked up and flown to the roof of a building about three hundred feet away. The same thing happened when more fire trucks arrived. I kept that up for about five minutes, by which time I was happy with the damage the fires had done, so I let the firemen get on with their jobs, even putting the hoses into their hands to let them know it was okay to start.

The crowd had thickened around me, standing so close that it was easy for me to secretly use NP to slide the folder out from under my jacket. I maneuvered it along the street toward the burning building, mostly by moving it under parked cars. When it was a considerable distance from me, I flew it up to join the map and pen. I borrowed a megaphone from one of the emergency vehicles too, sending it up to the same place.

I let the closest TV cameraman record the firefighters doing their thing for a couple of minutes, then I picked up a reporter and cameraman team. People always freak out when that happens, so I had to allow some time for them to calm down. Sitting them in an invisible chair with what feels like a floor underneath their feet is much more comfortable than being carried around. Also some gentle strokes on the cheek (for females) or handshakes (for males) reassures them.

I lowered the two Government troublemakers to an altitude of only a dozen feet, putting them in front of the cameraman and reporter. I pointed the camera at the two bosses, and the cameraman got the hint. The folder floated to be a few feet in front of the reporter. I opened it, showing her the top photo, which was of me. I floated the pen around in front of the reporter to get her attention, then used it to circle the names underneath the photo ("Ron Fisher a.k.a. Mark Anderson"). Then I fairly quickly showed each of the other photos, then the page that gave textual information about us and our car.

The next page was one of the orders. I showed it to her and the cameraman, then used the pen to circle the name of the person who'd issued the order. Then the pen floated over to the SS boss, pointing at his ID badge. I floated it off the owner's neck, moving it to be beside the order, where the pen pointed out that the two names were the same. I could see she was easily following. I flew the ID back to its owner.

The pen circled the part of the order that specified where the team was to set up. I floated the map over, and put an "X" on the spot. The reporter said something short and nodded.

I moved that order away, showing her the next order. I circled the location on the order, then made an "X" on the map at that location. Then I put another "X" on the side road we'd discovered the other team on, then I drew a circle through all the "X's", which encircled Corvallis. I pointed the pen at "Corvallis" on the map, tapping it a couple of times for emphasis, then I drew around the surveillance circle for three complete circuits, hopefully giving her the idea that Corvallis was encircled with Secret Service watchers.

My penultimate action was the float the megaphone to the reporter as I turned her around to face the bulk of the crowd. I moved her hand up to hold it, while waving the last order and the map side by side in front of her.

She got my meaning, squeezing the trigger on the megaphone and after a false start, got into the flow of it, telling the crowd, "The angel has shown me that the Secret Service has put watchers on all the roads around Corvallis, looking for Mark Anderson, his family and the Williamses."

It wasn't as full an explanation as I wanted, so I floated the SS boss's ID in front of her, jiggling it. She got the idea, and informed the crowd whose order it'd been. I returned the ID.

My families and I had planned for me to break the troublemakers' arms now, but I had an idea that had more Shock and Awe, especially Shock.

I located two desks that hadn't caught fire yet, floated them out of the building with the 'top' facing forward and the drawers facing up. I held the bosses upright, pulled their arms out to their sides, and pressed them against the tops of the desks, looking like a crucifixion.

I floated three axes up from the fire trucks. When the three axes came into view, hundreds of spectators suddenly inhaled in shock, doubtless fearing two more decapitations (the public isn't very good at mathematics). I didn't waste time, immediately propelling the axes into and through their targets: the SS boss had both his arms severed mid-forearm; the DHS big boss losing his right forearm.

Blood sprayed and my victims screamed, but not nearly as loudly as the screams of the females in the crowd. No helpful saber-toothed tigers appeared so the screams carried on for a ridiculous duration. I quickly lowered the 1.9 bosses (excluding their severed limbs) and the axes to the ground in front of paramedics. The desks and three forearms went into a part of the building that was burning particularly well. These guys weren't going to have their arms reattached, as that would've ruined most of the value of the lesson. I'd left them their elbows though, out of mercy.

The folder of evidence and the map I pushed into the reporter's hands. She was in shock as it'd happened only a few feet in front of her, so the folder had to nudge her a few times. When she had it, I lowered her and the cameraman to the ground, then the Guardian Angel followed them, disappearing into the ground.

My task was done now, but I couldn't leave yet because the crowd had hemmed me in. I'd have to wait for it to dissipate when nothing further happened. It might take a while but I wasn't in any particular hurry.

I heard some bright spark yell out, "The angel's gone to get NUCLEAR BOMBS!"

The previous screaming was NOTHING compared to the bedlam that caused! People were screaming, running, colliding, screaming, falling over, screaming, getting trampled, screaming, getting up, pausing to have a scream, and then running away while screaming. There was a lot of screaming.

The fireman had to drop their hoses and put all their efforts into stopping people who thought that the fastest way out of the area was through the burning building. The crowd was thinner that way so that's where some people ran. They must have been too busy screaming to be able to think. On second thought, the cause and effect was probably the other way around.

It took less than a minute for the area to get noticeably emptier. My staying would've stood out, so I started my bike and left without bothering to scream. The emergency services obviously don't hire people who run around screaming at the first hint of trouble, because all the emergency workers were busy doing their jobs. The DHS building isn't a small one (yet), and it's in a high-density area, so the firemen had their work cut out for them.

The building also houses the Portland Post Office, which was burning well. There'd presumably be many thousands of destroyed letters and who knows what other collateral damage. With any luck it'd piss off very many people and the Secret Service would get the blame.

People in the surrounding buildings were very cooperatively running away screaming too. Central Portland was rapidly turning into a ghost town. More accurately, a gridlocked ghost town, but motorcycles not only provide a great excuse for wearing a crash helmet, they're also very good at negotiating gridlocked streets.

I'd expected the surveillance team just south of Salem to still be in their position, figuring the SS's radio transmitter and all their phones had gone up in flames, but the team was gone when I rode past their spot. Also absent was the team just north of Eugene.

I rode to where my families were and waved at them. Without stopping, I led them back to the house I'd borrowed the bike from.

When I got out of the leathers, I did so in the center of an open area of his private yard. As each article of clothing came off, I turned it inside out and shook it repeatedly to dislodge any trace of me, paying particular attention to the helmet as I didn't have a ski mask any longer. I'd buy several the next time I got a chance, as they're almost as useful as dark sheets.

I'd used NP to keep the girls away from me while I was putting everything back to normal, so I got the hugs and news when I got back into the SUV. They'd been listening to the portable radio. They could've watched the SUV's TV, but it was best to follow the story we would use later: "When we got to Eugene, the angel made us drive to a quiet spot, took the keys and had locked the doors with us inside to make the point that we should stay."

So my families knew about the 'hand jobs' I'd given in Portland, and could confirm that "Shock" had certainly been achieved, along with massive panic in Portland and Washington DC. People were streaming out of both cities. A much slower stream in DC because its streets were terribly inadequate for emergency evacuations. Parents were descending on the schools to grab their kids, offices were emptying, passengers on planes heading for those two cities were demanding the pilots turn around, while other passengers demanded the planes landed so the passengers could rush home to rescue their families. Fights were breaking out in the aisles. Some airlines ordered the planes going to DC to turn around, and some airlines did not. Sometimes the pilots followed their orders, and sometimes they disobeyed them. It was chaos in all directions, just like it had been the previous time.

The President, from an Undisclosed Location, urged calm, but didn't go so far as to say it was safe to stay in either of those cities. It'd be rather embarrassing for him if he'd told people to stay and I nuked one of the cities. He was trying to encourage calmness, but he was totally failing to achieve any - people were ANGRY! The Guardian Angel had made it EXTREMELY clear in its last email that it didn't want, "People's-government interferes-spies-threats-attacks my assignment and his loves." Having Secret Service surveillance operations set up around Corvallis with pictures of us all certainly fit the definition of "spies", and no one trusted the Government not to progress to "interferes", "threats" or "attacks" once they knew where we were. That was even a predictable and widely believed escalation, given the Government's habit of repeatedly attacking my family.