Free Chronic Fear by Scott Nicholson Page B

chain, somebody so high that Harding could merely roll his eyes heavenward, ordered that the pair be monitored until further notice.
    With the curtains drawn, Gundersson figured he was done for the day. The couple’s routine was to eat breakfast on the porch, feed the gaggle of hens they kept in an open pen behind the cabin, take a little walk along the creek, dig in the garden for maybe an hour, and then rest a little before lunch. After lunch, he’d log onto his computer and she’d get out the paints and brushes.
    Gundersson zoomed in on the painting currently drying on the easel.
    Sure looks like some drugs involved. Freaky stuff like that, it’s no wonder they kicked her out of the university. Couldn’t have her warping the minds of our next generation of grade-school teachers.
    But he’d not observed any drug use of any kind, not even a bottle of cooking sherry. For crazed, anti-American hippies and possible threats to national security, they sure seemed docile.
    He was just getting ready to climb down from the tree and head back to his camp on the edge of the national wilderness area when the couple came out on the porch.
    Gundersson slowly lifted the binoculars again.
    Shit.
    Roland Doyle was armed, wearing nothing but boxer shorts, a black revolver dangling at his side. He clearly wasn’t trained with it, because he carried it like somebody in a movie. Wendy Leng hunched behind him in a bathrobe.
    “Where did you see it?” Doyle asked, not bothering to lower his voice.
    She pointed about thirty feet to Gundersson’s right.
    Roland marched down the porch steps, across the narrow skirt of ragged grass, and into the forest. Leaves crunched and scuffed under his bare feet. Gundersson was armed but he didn’t dare move, although he gently let the binoculars rest by their strap against his chest.
    Harding said Roland Doyle was “a nothing,” despite a few alcohol-related legal troubles in the past. The unspoken message was that Gundersson was on a babysitting errand and it was time to just shut up and follow orders. Wendy Leng was even cleaner, despite her subversive art. On the surface, they were just intellectual rebels, maybe a little too liberal for their own good but certainly not plotting to smuggle nuclear weapons.
    But Gundersson was trained to believe nothing was as it appeared on the surface, and Harding’s directive of “Don’t ask questions” had certainly spawned a lot of questions.
    Roland moved between the trees, not bothering to muffle his footsteps. He didn’t look up, either, which meant Gundersson hadn’t been spotted.
    He was in Gundersson’s line of sight now and headed toward a small clearing. Roland raised the pistol in front of him and moved aside a birch sapling. Gundersson calculated how long it would take to draw his Glock from his shoulder holster. Being in such an awkward position might slow him and it would be hard to do so silently.
    “Do you see it, honey?” Wendy called from the porch.
    “No,” he said. “You sure it was out this way?”
    “It ran from behind the pen straight down that little trail.”
    It. She’s calling it an “it.” Which means it isn’t me.
    Still, Gundersson remained tensed and ready for action. Roland had a furtive aspect about him, as if he was enjoying the hunt.
    The shrubs to Roland’s right exploded with motion and Roland raised the pistol, squeezing off three shots in rapid succession. The sudden thunder boomed across the hills. Gundersson had the impression of a sleek, dark animal bounding away, but it was the bushy red tail that helped him identify it.
    A fox?
    The animal couldn’t have been more than ten feet from Roland, which reassured Gundersson that the guy was too liberal to practice his marksmanship. The fox, instead of bolting deeper into the woods, took a detour and splashed up the creek. Roland fired one more wild shot, sending a ricochet off a rock that zizzed through the woods. The fox slowed and trotted up the creek