I. "A Sense of Insufferable Gloom"

Part One

The grass always looks greener on the other side...
People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones...
You can lead a horse to water...
The truth shall set you free...

Ahh, now that was the one Wyatt Douglass could wrap his mind around. Father Milton seemed to be saying it all the time. In the face of the toughest quandaries laid before him, his answer to the troubled world of a boy who, maybe, could never truly escape adolescence was, “The truth shall set you free.”

Wyatt blinked against the pale sunlight shining through the unbroken blue sky. He was lost in a maze of circling thoughts, barely noticing the sleepy cow grazing idly a few feet away. The grass always looks greener on the other side, Wyatt repeated in his head. I don’t know, he thought doubtfully, straining his gaze to focus on the horizon. The Oklahoma state line was only a few miles from where he stood. Beyond the boundary, once only marked by lines on a map and the meandering Red River, the open plains of North Texas sat stretching across the quiet landscape. It looks pretty much the same from here.

There was a strange and sudden flicker of something inside of him. It was a feeling that passed through his heart like the briefest of electrical shocks. Was it longing? Wyatt could not name it precisely. He couldn’t even discuss it with anyone, nor would he.

Suddenly, and without any real thought, Wyatt caught himself looking sidelong at the grazing cow standing amongst the long, untended grass of the quiet field. A soft, winter breeze teased the swaying blades that gently brushed against his arms left bare by the rolled-up sleeves of his white dress shirt. It was a cold day, but he didn’t really care. He watched the heavy animal chew a mouthful of grass for a long moment. “How does it taste,” Wyatt heard himself ask the cow. Its eyes looked up at him slowly. Its expression didn’t hide its disinterest in his question.

Wyatt blinked, then asked another question. “Does it taste the same over there?” He gestured with a nod of his head toward the direction of Texas.

The cow paused, perhaps considering an answer. It blinked away a few flies that had landed too close on its brown and white-spotted face. Its nostrils, porous and slightly damp, flared. Its tail swished, more flies, buzzing excitedly, were teasing the end of the placid animal they preferred. Then, as if finding strength that had been lost for a moment, as if its thick bones had somehow become jammed and its brain had worked out how to unhinge the faulty mechanism in its jaw, the cow began to chew the curd noisily between its teeth.

Wyatt sighed and looked back toward the horizon. “I guess the grass is the same.”

“Agent Douglass?”

The winter wind pushed across the field again. It carried a whiff of the choking, gray smoke rolling out of a slowly crumbling barn and silo. Both were still on fire near the broken farm house several hundred yards behind the spot where Wyatt stood. He turned around slowly to watch the young, blonde-haired man trudge with annoyance through the tall grass. He was barely in his twenties, as Wyatt understood. He didn’t inquire to find out for certain. He didn’t care. The kid was a policy jockey. His only job was to stand around amongst those actually working, making sure the strings and bridles of the latest bureaucracy were tightly woven and tangled around limb and tongue so they could be manipulated and nudged like the marionettes they were. Wyatt and those like him were simply the arms and legs of the latest whim for those in power. Wyatt watched the loyal eyes and ears of some Administration lap dog sitting somewhere in Washington D.C. stop with an exasperated sigh.

“Agent Douglass,” the boyish man asked again, a sharp irritation edging his voice. “...You’ve been here almost ten minutes, sir. I think you came a long way from Washington just to stand in a field.”

Was that a threat, Wyatt pondered briefly, listening to the young man’s words. He didn’t really look at him. The sight of the ravaged buildings, the wrecked core of this small, family farm Wyatt was standing at the edge of, was too distracting. Wyatt didn’t say anything for a long moment, drawing out the awkwardness of the breezy silence. He watched the youthful figure only in the periphery of his vision, easily noticing the way he began to fidget nervously the longer Wyatt didn’t comment.

“Thank you, Mr...” Wyatt said at last, the tone of his voice even in the chill of the air separating the two government employees.

“Parks,” the blonde-haired young man said quickly. “Gordon Parks, sir.”

Wyatt acknowledged his young man’s name dismissively. “Right. Mr. Parks.” He took a deep breath, considering his next words for a moment. “I appreciate your obvious concern for my time.”

“Yes...sir. It’s just that...the others in the house...Well, the local authorities would like to go ahead and close up the scene, sir.”

There was something in the way he said the word “sir” that bothered Wyatt. He couldn’t say how or why specifically. But the air seemed to snap around the young man’s soft, glossy-looking lips whenever he said it.

“And since you are the lead representative for the slain agents, sir,” Gordon Parks added after the briefest of pauses. Wyatt detected the smugness in his young voice. There was an ego within his slender frame not very well veiled.

“Then I suppose we should be on our way,” Wyatt said, slipping his hands into his pants pockets. It was both a casual and disarming move, he knew. He caught the subtle change of expression on the narrow, fair-skinned face of the boyish Gordon Parks.

“Do you mind if I ask what you were doing out here, Agent Douglass?”

Wyatt turned around one last time. He spotted the distant horizon again. He tried to focus in on the stretch of land and water marking the edge of what to him felt like light and darkness. The sun shone evenly on both sides. Yet, the air felt heavier here. The acrid smell of smoke seemed to persist everywhere on this side at once. The grass may be the same on the other side, Wyatt thought again. But everything else is better. He turned away from the softly billowing fields and looked at the blonde hair of Gordon Parks; and then the crumbling, burning buildings near a home shot-out and ravaged. It has to be better.

“I was just admiring the view,” Wyatt said as he walked past Gordon Parks. “I work for the EPA. It’s part of my job.”

“Oh,” replied Gordon Parks, uncertainly. “Of course.”

* * *

For Mark LeVine and Zach Goyer, life was never going to be the same again. They didn’t know it when their alarm clock began to whine its blaring call across their darkened bedroom. They didn’t know it as they shuffled groggily about their small, ranch style house in the small, suburban city of Springfield, Virginia. There was no sign or feelings of omens in the predawn hour. There was no hint of concern, no thought of possible dread in the light, half-mumbled and sleepy conversation the couple exchanged as they made coffee and readied to head out the door. It was to be another long, average workday-not that they minded. It was life. It was their life.

HEART AND SOUL was the name of the modest bakery they owned and managed together. Besides themselves, they had two other employees. The shop of white plaster and gray stucco walls sat nestled on the corner of a mostly vacant shopping center. It was disheartening to see the once bustling plaza become even more ghostlike with each new day. The facade was slowly giving in to time’s relentless push. The sidewalk was a myriad of cracks spread out across the concrete planks like threads of a spider web. The bakery was the last private enterprise on the entire block. In the conspicuous, stale shadow of the distant capital, prosperity seemed to be packing its bags and heading for greener pastures faster than ever.

It wasn’t until they had parked their chugging and sputtering sedan in the empty parking lot that Mark and Zach became aware that this day was going to be very different from every other that came before it. With the headlights still on and shining across the weed-freckled asphalt to spill over the sidewalk and storefront, the men’s eyes beheld with unblinking awe the open cavities that had once been the doors and windows of their business.

“Oh my, God...” Zach whispered in shock, standing beside their car. He hadn’t even completely gotten out yet.

Mark was opening the trunk, digging an old baseball bat out from under a sparse layer of old coats and tool pouches littering the dark compartment. At the same time, Zach was searching his pockets for his cell phone. “I’ll call the police,” he said over the sound of Mark closing the lid of the trunk.

Mark simply nodded in response, walking toward the entrance of the bakery with trembling hands and a racing pulse. It wasn’t until his feet touched the curb that Mark became the first of the two men to grasp the new idea of the change their lives were suddenly and involuntarily taking. It was as his wide, brown eyes scanned over the shards of glass on the sidewalk, gleaming slightly in the dim headlights, and the twisted pieces of the thin, metal door frame that Mark began to question the world. Why did this happen? Who would have done this? What did they want? Why would anyone let this happen? It was then he began to lift his gaze from the glass-littered stoop to the shop’s facade that Mark felt his nerve-wracking fear suddenly becoming a blood-boiling rage.

His trembling hands had become stiff, the muscles and ligaments almost painfully tight. The war tempo drum beat of his pulse was no longer weary of some impending attacker leaping out of their vandalized property, but was spurred by a surge of adrenaline feeding unstoppable anger.

“...I’m not sure. Hold on, I’ll find out,” came Zach’s voice from somewhere behind Mark. “Is there anyone in there? Can you see anyone?”

Mark turned to look back through the glare of the headlights toward the idling sedan. He shook his head before looking toward the damaged entrance again. His eyes remained fixed, frozen madly on the letters spray painted across the stucco: UNION.