Hunting Indians - Chapter 17

Chapter 1 can be found: https://steemit.com/fiction/@andrewgenaille/hunting-indians-chapter-one

Chapter 16 can be found: https://steemit.com/fiction/@andrewgenaille/hunting-indians-chapter-16

1. Chapter 17

Maggie loved to talk. She started talking the moment Karen climbed into the back seat of her car and continued the entire two and a half hours getting to the city. It wasn't exactly a conversation either. She asked no questions for Karen to answer and she never waited for an opinion or a correction. The sixty-year-old white woman simply talked.
It didn't matter to Karen though. It meant she could tune the lady out and focus on her plans concerning Kevin. She knew that she would have to stop him but how far she was willing to go was still open for debate.
She couldn't completely focus though. Every so often her mind would wander to where Beth was which could be any number of places inside the system. Best-case scenario, she went dark because it was too dangerous to pass on information or in the open. Worse case she was the victim of a security warrant and dead in a hole somewhere. The second idea made Karen want to throw up.
The two have known each other for nearly eleven years.

Karen moved silently through the forest with her rifle at the ready. She spent the last two hours tracking a good-sized deer. She knew she needed to get it soon since it was moving very close to civilization and any shot out here would bring questions and authority. The trees were thinning and getting into provincial park territory.
She didn't see Beth at first, just movement out of the corner of her eye that caused her to spin around and aim. Beth stood there like a deer in headlights. Her blonde hair pulled back over her ears and down her back, wearing a summer dress covered in flowers way out of place to be out here. Karen was faced with a dilemma. The girl could alert the authorities and fill the forest with Indian Agents and militia, but she wasn't the type to shoot innocents.
"I'm..." Beth said, her voice filled with fear and not conveying any of the authority she would eleven years later. "Please don't shoot me. I'm looking for my son...he thinks we're playing hide and go seek, and...I can't find him. I can't."
Karen lowered her rifle as she considered it. The deer would get away from her but this really wasn't the forest you wanted to be lost in. "What does he look like?"
"He's five. This tall and blonde." Beth said.
Karen nodded and slung her rifle over her shoulder. A five year old out here was going to be easy to spot. Being light wouldn't make it harder as they were usually clumsy in their walk and left scrapes and marks. Beth watched as Karen walked the area, spanning out further and further. It took about five minutes before she found the scrape of a small sneaker in a patch of mud.
"This way."
Karen walked in the direction of the shoe prints, looking for more signs as Beth followed behind. After a moment she started yelling. "Edward! Eddy!"
Karen turned to Beth, causing her to stop suddenly. "Don't do that."
"But I need to find him."
"He's playing hide and go seek," Karen said, "If he hears you coming, you're giving him a chance to find a better spot."
"Oh."
Karen smirked. It was another five minutes before they came across Edward’s hiding spot. Karen stopped Beth from walking and pointed it out to her. Edward had found a nook in a large tree and was curled up in there as best he could as he tried to keep quiet. "To him, it's just a game."
Beth snuck up on Edward and grabbed him. She pulled him out of the tree as the kid squealed. Karen sighed as she watched the two of them have their reunion. Beth was clearly full of relief while the kid was still giggling. Karen felt a little warmth in her chest but it was replaced with sadness. She thought about how this would never happen for her. Her world was too dangerous to bring someone new into it, not with her position in the movement.
"Mom, an Indian." Edward pointed to Karen in surprise.
"Yes..." Beth looked to Karen, not sure how to explain it. "She is...she helped me find you. Thank-you."
"You cheated!" Edward shouted.
"You have to go now." Karen said.
"Oh, we're sorry." Beth said, she wondered if they were trespassing.
"No, it's not safe out here for you and him. There's a Militia out tonight. It's one thing to be Indian when they find you, but just as dangerous to be a girl." Karen said. Beth nodded.
"Oh, ok." Beth climbed to her feet. "Um...how do we get out of here?"
Karen smiled. She motioned with her head and led the two of them through the trees.
"Why are you out here?" Karen asked after a few minutes of listening to Edward ask questions about everything he saw. Karen kept up though and gave him the names of everything they saw, from plant life to small animals.
"We're on an adventure." Edward answered.
"Right."
"And mom and Grandpa are fighting, so we're running away." Edward continued.
"We're not running away."
"You said we were."
"I'm twenty-four years old, that's not called running away, that's called..." Beth stopped when she saw the amused look Karen was giving her. "...taking responsibility for yourself."
"And the responsible thing to do was to go to the worst possible place on the planet?" Karen said.
"When you're out of options, you're out of options." Beth said defensively.
"Sweetheart, if I looked like you I'd never run out of options."
"That's what Grandpa said." Edward blurted out.
"Hush, what's that supposed to mean?" Beth said, quickening her steps to catch up to Karen.
"I'm just saying, in your world things couldn't get any worse." Karen stopped to look at her. "But that's your world. Come live in my world for awhile and you'll get to see just how bad it can get. One day in my world and you'll be running home and counting your blessings."
Beth didn't have an argument against that. She knew what's been going on recently and her fight with her father wanting her to be a waitress was shallow in comparison. "Ok."
"Let's keep going." Karen said as the three moved through the forest.
They came to an old parking lot built fifty years ago by the Parks board, but due to its proximity to hostile territory it was left to degrade. It was still used by the militia as they made their patrols, so the garbage cans were full and with crap piled around them. The washrooms were covered in spray paint and almost everything was overgrown with blackberries.
Beth pointed to her car next to the trees, a small Honda designed for fuel efficiency and not much else. Parked next to it were three large dodge trucks, all painted army green while one sat taller than the others on oversized tires. The bumper sticker on the large one read 'Only good Indian is a dead one...wanna see?'
"It's a good time to get out of here." Karen said and waited for them to leave. She was taken aback when Edward gave her a big hug.
"You can't be going back in there? Not with those guys walking around." Beth stated.
"I live in there." Karen said back.
"You helped me find my son...let me drive you somewhere they aren't."
"Where would that be?" Karen asked. Her reality was the forest littered with Militia, sometimes the Military reserves.
"I don't know...up the road."
Karen nodded and Edward led her to the car. He tried to open the passenger door for her but she had to help him. Karen got in as Beth went about putting Edward into his chair, then climbed in behind the steering wheel. Karen had some issues placing her rifle, but that was the nature of the car, tiny.
The drive wasn't as easy as just dropping her off. Along the way they passed two more Militia trucks on their way to the highway. When they reached the TransCanada it was too late to stop. Passing cars would've seen this Honda dropping off an armed Indian. Instead they decided to keep driving until they found another turn off they could use.
Karen checked to see that Edward was asleep as the sun started to go down. "Where's his father?"
"I don't know...work maybe, Alberta."
"He's out of the picture?"
"Aaron? No, oh no, he's just...we're not together. We're just really good friends." Beth said.
"Oh." Karen nodded.
"Well like, he was planned. I wanted a kid, and Aaron wanted a kid, so we said we'll have one together. Yeah, so here we are." Beth smiled, "Money's tight though, so I live at my dad's place out here and he thinks when he visits that gives him the right to tell me how I should be running my life. I'm in school, I'm making ends meet kind of, but he keeps telling me that I have a kid to look out for and it's going to get more expensive, so I should just drop everything and get a full time job. You tell me, what kind of father would say that. Most dads want their kids to succeed."
"I don't know." Karen shrugged.
"Bet your dad was supportive."
"Yeah." Karen said. It was be supportive or your kid died painfully. Beth talked for another half hour about her life and they ended up driving through the small town that Beth lived in.
She drove past her house to see if her father's BMW was still there but it was gone. She pulled up and used the automatic door opener. She parked the Honda inside and closed the door behind them so nobody would see Karen.
The plan was to spend the night and then Beth would take her back to the woods at first light when the Militia would be home nursing their hangovers. Instead Karen stayed for a month at the house. She stayed inside to avoid the neighbours and babysat Edward so Beth could continue going to school.
Everyday Karen mentioned that she had to return to the forest to take care of her family. There was so much going on that nobody ever knew where they stood. Everyday, she convinced herself to stay, usually by something Beth mentioned she needed help with or something she realized she should teach Edward.
Then at night after the kid went to bed, Beth and Karen stayed up late with wine and popcorn to watch movies. Some nights they'd laugh themselves silly at Seth Rogan movies, or cried together at a British period piece. It was enough to make Karen almost forget that there's a genocide going on.
The news didn't help either. Over the last month, with all that was going on across the country Karen found the daily news reports never mentioned Indians. What little there was seemed to be sanitized versions of what was actually happening, talking about how schools were being opened on the reserves, fresh food transported in, indoor plumbing and the Natives being trained. If you believed the government, the Reserves were being turned into their own self-sustaining societies.
This is when things changed.
Karen and Beth just finished one of their movies and began discussing the lack of plot when Beth switched back to the television. The news report was about how the military had to move into the reserve due to a small uprising earlier that day. Insurgents from the forest had attacked the reserve killing other natives for selling out.
"They wouldn't do that! We wouldn't do that!" Karen said in shock. She looked to Beth. "Why would we do that?"
Beth shrugged and shook her head. The two of them watched the rest of the report as some General Antoine said they would be pursuing the Insurgents back into the forest.
"I have to go." Karen said after the news went to a story of a cat that could predict the Oscars. "I have to go home."
"You can't go...not now." Beth stated, "It's not safe now."
"That's why I have to go. My family is out there. My parents, my sisters...I have to go." Karen stared at the other but Beth stood and walked down the hall.
Karen waited a few minutes and then followed. She found Beth on the edge of her bed crying. "Beth..."
"What about Eddy? What are you going to tell him?" Beth looked up at her.
"That I'm going to go look for adventure." Karen smiled.
She told Edward the next morning, and it was painful as she said goodbye. He seemed sad to her but he didn't fully understand the concept of going away like this. In his world she was leaving forever. Beth felt the same way as she hugged Karen goodbye, feeling like she would never see the other again.
"I'll come back." Karen said at the forest line where Beth had brought her.
"You promise?" Beth asked.
"Yeah, I don't have cable out there, and the new seasons are coming up." Karen chuckled and Beth hugged her. It was a long hug and filled with so many unsaid emotions.
This began one of the worst months of Beth's life.
The next day she took Edward to day care while she went to her college class, but found she wasn't able to concentrate. People tried to talk to her but she only saw them as voids, white noise in the background of her thoughts. She returned home with Edward and it was difficult to play with her son. She could see those same emotions on his face that she was feeling then he asked, "When's Karen coming back?"
"I don't know." Beth lied. To her, being honest would've been to say 'never.'
Then after Edward was put down to bed she would scour the Internet and news for any information on the Indians. What she found were reports of small skirmishes here and there when '12 Indians were killed, no casualties' or 'native resistance met with overwhelming force.'
The only positive news came a few weeks later when General Antoine was "felled by a sniper’s bullet" while inspecting the front lines. Unfortunately the response from the military was five days of straight shelling followed by a massive swell of ground forces. The end of the week the Prime Minister’s Office declared the Insurgency over as the last of them were rounded up. At the end of the month over five hundred Indians were dead.
Beth curled up on her couch and cried herself to sleep.
Over the next week Beth went into automatic. She followed her laid out script of taking her son to daycare, going to school and now a part time job at the local muffin shop. Most of it was in a daze, as she couldn't absorb the world around her, or wasn't able to talk to anybody but Edward as to what was troubling her.
Not even to Edward, he was far too young to understand but also because she wanted him to keep the hope that Karen would return.
Then Karen did.
Tuesday, Beth unlocked the door that night and let Edward race inside first as she grabbed the groceries. When she walked into the house she could hear her son giggle and talk a mile a minute. A puzzled Beth walked into the living room where Karen was crouching down to talk to Edward.
Beth's sudden intake of air caused Karen to look up at her and smile. Beth put her groceries down and waited as she controlled her emotions.
"Hey, why don't you go find me that?" Karen said to Edward as he told her about his new action figure.
"Ok." Edward darted for the staircase.
Karen stood and watched Beth for a few seconds. "See, I said I'd be back."
Beth moved across the room and grabbed onto Karen, the two held onto each other to let reality sink in before Karen took the back of Beth's head and moved their lips together. It was a powerful kiss as two months of their lives were summed up into a single moment.

What felt like a lifetime later, Karen stood in the shadows of an alley across from the government building that may or may not have imprisoned Beth. Karen looked up at the fourteen-floor building. At this angle its silver windows reflected this side of the street. Nothing got in, nothing got out. Even the front lobby was behind thick glass and a security guard station where the two uniformed men could press a button to bring down steal gates over the first floor.
Maybe she was working, Karen thought, maybe she was just keeping her head down.
She could also have been caught, and stuck in a cell in the building or taken away to disappear inside the system. Karen wanted to put that out of her mind but couldn't. She grew up knowing about the kids that disappeared through the residential school system. A system designed to hide everything. It was possible the next time they heard of Beth could be thirty years from now as historians scanned documents. She would be nothing more than a scribbled name and date.
"You stand out like a sore thumb." Kevin said from further back in the alley. Karen turned around to face him. "Come upstairs."
"What's upstairs?"
"Less people." Kevin motioned with his lips toward the street as people passed, oblivious to the alley, used to ignoring the people that normally dwelled in there.
Kevin led Karen toward an alleyway door that he left propped open, closing it after she entered before they both headed for a service elevator.
"I had to duck in the front earlier when I recognized someone, found a door to the back stairs and five floors up they're completely empty." Kevin explained, he didn't know the whole history and economics behind the empty floors but didn't care. "I've been watching the building across the street for the last couple of hours."
Kevin stepped off the elevator into a wide-open office center, with remnants of a business stashed in the corners. Some trashed cubicles here and there and phone wires dangled from the ceiling. Karen followed him as he walked across the way to the large windows overlooking the street below, and government buildings across the way.
"So far they haven't been coming or going. Occasionally one will drive out to I don't know where, can't follow them on foot but it doesn't matter, for the most part they're all in there, held up and hiding." Kevin motioned upward to the tenth floor where the Indian Agents moved around their offices. "Cause they aren't going home, and it's getting late."
"So what are you going to do?" Karen asked as she moved back from the window, the last thing they needed was for someone to look across and see them.
"I thought about waiting them out. I'm usually a pretty patient person. The longer I wait though, the angrier I get." Kevin leaned his head against the window. "I hate...being angry."
"You have to stop Kevin. I need you to stop." Karen said. He turned to look at her. "We have to leave and get back to where we belong right now."
"Leave? After what they did?"
"Yes, right now. We can't afford this. Everything's getting screwed up..."
"Everything is already screwed up." Kevin raised his voice for a moment. "I'm setting things straight."
"At a cost to the rest of us," Karen moved forward. "Are you even thinking about that? Every time you push, they push harder. They've executed people Kevin. They've destroyed our camps and killed the people hiding there. Every step you've taken has led them back to us."
"You know who you sound like?" Kevin asked.
"Don't."
"No, you sound like the leadership," He smirked at the irony. "You sound just like them before you called them cowards. You…called them cowards."
"There's a difference."
"I don't see one."
"We have a plan. We were putting things in motion that would..."
"Your plan got Rachel killed!" Kevin yelled, his voice echoed through the empty offices. There was a moment of silence between them.
"My plan?" Karen's eyes went wide in shock.
"For the greater good, this is what happens when we fight for the greater good."
"You are beyond screwed up and confused."
"No...no."
"It was your call Kevin, you told me it's what had to be done." Karen reminded him, hitting him where it hurt, a place he didn't want to think about. "I asked if it's something you could do, or Peter. Could you just stand by and watch someone die? You said you could. You said it had to happen. You went to find those hunters and you made this. What did you think would happen?"
"It shouldn't have been her."
"It shouldn't have been anybody." Karen said.
"That's why I have to do this? So there isn't anybody else, so they don't do it anymore. Nobody else dies." Kevin pointed to the government building. "And I make them pay."
"Them? You kill ten, they kill a thousand. We're not going to win this war that way. You have to stop."
"Or what?"
"Or I'm going to stop you."
Kevin considered what that meant and he studied her face. He nodded and took a step for her. She pulled out a handgun and she pointed it at him. Kevin stopped moving and then relaxed.
"What are you going to do?" He asked.
"There's too much at stake, not just for us, but every nation and we need them to back off for awhile. You're not letting them." She explained. The weapon was steady.
"What are you going to do?"
"I will kill you." Karen said plainly.
"Can you? For the greater good? One of your own?" Kevin stepped back from her, to give her calming space. "And just walk away? Are you that cold?"
"I can be."
"And Beth? What about her?" Kevin let it sink in. "They know about her? There's no way they can't. You talk to her lately? Cause I'm thinking she's gone dark."
"What did you do?"
"Crossed paths. And now, she's probably over there somewhere. In some little room answering questions, which would be the only reason they would keep her alive. Until she gives up everything and everyone she knows." Kevin moved to the window and looked out. "Then what? You expected me to just walk away, when it's the person you love? Are you able to? Right now, are you going to leave her to die?"
Karen had no words, no thoughts, just a feeling in the pit of her stomach. She took a breath and mentally wrestled with it. Beth could already be dead. Anything they did would mean backlash for all natives across the country. Was she allowed to put one person above them all? A white person.
Kevin watched as Karen closed her eyes and lowered the weapon. There was a part of him that knew he should feel bad for using her history against her like that but he didn't, he couldn't. The feelings for vengeance over shadowed everything else to him.
"They outnumber us. They're armed. We can't just walk in there and get her." Karen said after a moment. She hoped he had a simple answer to make her believe that Beth could be rescued.
"Yes, actually I think we can."

https://steemit.com/fiction/@andrewgenaille/hunting-indians-chapter-18