Dissolution: The Wyoming Chronicles: Book One Read online

  Since neither Court nor Jon were around, the men’s must have been a two-holer.

  At the counter, Amber was standing with a hand on her hip, the cashier saying, “...Don’t know how long it will take. It’s sure got everything messed up. The manager’s called corporate, but it seems to be everywhere. Started a couple of hours ago. From what people tell me, it’s all over town. No credit cards being accepted anywhere. Like the whole system’s down. VISA, Mastercard, Amex, doesn’t make any difference. Declined. Declined. Declined. Phone lines are jammed. Just an automated message when you call the bank.”

  “So, what do we do?” Amber’s expression had the bruised-and-black look akin to an impending storm’s.

  “All I can tell you is that I gotta have cash. Boss says we can do a local check with ID.”

  Amber turned to Sam and arched a thin red eyebrow. She was five-foot-five with the light reddish hair that people called strawberry blonde. The look on her wedge-shaped face was anything but friendly, and her blue eyes had turned crystalline. Up close, a faint sprinkling of freckles could be seen on the bridge of her nose and forehead.

  “It’s been about a hundred and twenty for each fill up. Right, Sam?”

  “Yeah.”

  Amber went to her purse, shelling out three fifties, saying as she did, “Keys are in the van’s ignition. Could you see to gassing everyone up?”

  His bladder argued vehemently against it, but he said, “Sure.”

  He was her crew chief—the second in command who would see to the actual running of things once they got up on the mountain. Refusing just because he had to pee? What a weenie.

  “Yeah,” the cashier said as she took the cash, “down the street they had to call the cops. Couple of truckers had just filled their rigs when the cards were declined. Now they can’t move.”

  Sam made his way out to the vehicles and commenced to fill the van. One by one, Dylan drove the vehicles forward to get the tanks filled.

  Pumping that much gas gave him a chance to look around. Not that Casper was much to see. First off, he noticed that a big sign was being pasted in the window of the Burger King across the avenue. CASH ONLY!!!

  Next door, the Taco Bell had put up a CLOSED TODAY sign.

  As Dylan drove the BMW into a parking space, Sam got his chance at the john while the rest of the crew was counting out bills and change for their purchases at the register.

  Amber gestured Sam to the side as the rest trooped out to the cars. “How much cash you got, Sam?”

  He pulled out his wallet and thumbed through the bills. “About a hundred and fifty.”

  “I’ve got about two hundred left.”

  “Hey, they’ll have this fixed by the time we get to Hot Springs.”

  He glanced back down the road at the Flying J where a second police car had pulled into the parking lot, its lights flashing. More people were crowding around.

  “Memorial day weekend? Best hope so, Sam. That or we’ll have to see if we can get an advance at the bank in Hot Springs.”

  “Come on, Amber,” he told her with a smile. “The country runs on credit cards. You can bet that they’ve got everybody and their dogs hopping to fix it. And God help the poor goofus who pushed the wrong button to start all this.”

  The tension lingered in her eyes as she looked up at the midday sun, then lowered her gaze to the mountain that rose like a wall to south. “Yeah,” she said.

  Across the street, an asshole honked angrily as he peeled out of the Burger King’s parking lot and flipped a bird at the restaurant—a final reminder of his frustration.

  Of course they’d fix it. They had to.

  The Once and Future War

  Money is one of those things that preoccupy us. It’s, like, fundamental to who we are. What we do. How we feed ourselves, clothe our bodies, make ourselves and our loved ones secure. It’s how we pay for Netflix and the latest Call of Duty game. Money is everyone’s major preoccupation. The need for status, sex, security, love, and approval might have been with us from the beginning of the Pleistocene, but we have only ourselves to blame for our obsession with money.

  In Gone With the Wind, Scarlet tells Rhett Butler, “Money won’t buy you happiness.” To which he replies, “No, but it will buy some remarkable substitutes.”

  Who’d have thought something so fundamental could be so fragile?

  — Excerpt from Breeze Tappan’s Journal.

  Chapter Two

  To call Wyoming empty was to overstate the situation. The only person in the field crew from a small town was Shyla; and Rutland, Vermont, was in a completely different league compared to what they encountered upon leaving the awesome majesty of Wind River Canyon.

  Hot Springs, which would be their closest town to the project area, consisted of 1300 people, a minuscule downtown, a truck stop, a couple of museums—including one that advertised dinosaurs—a tannery, and a single small grocery store.

  “This place wouldn’t pass for a town in Tajikistan,” Kirstin muttered as Sam followed Dylan’s pickup down the main street.

  Sam couldn’t help it: “So, Kirstin, consider it a test of character. A trial to see if you can live without Bergdorf Goodman and Amazon for a whole two months.”

  In the rearview mirror, she flipped him a stiff middle finger.

  They had to pony-up cash again when they finally arrived at the Days Inn in Hot Springs. Nobody was happy about it; even with room sharing it pretty much wiped out Jon and Danielle’s stashes.

  Jon Brimmer was a first-year archaeology grad student, lab assistant, and part-time musician. The guy was always broke. This was his first field training.

  Studying to be a museum curator, Danielle Cory was a junior and Sam’s fellow New Yorker—though she hailed from Manhattan. Danielle lived and died by the credit card. She made no bones about being a Jew and joked about trying to keep the diet.

  Sam, Dylan, Jon, and Court did a guy’s supper that night, picking Pizza Hut for the economics rather than celebrating a gustatory reward worthy of having completed all but the last couple miles of the journey.

  If the field crew had a misfit, it was Court Hamilton. The guy was a computer science major and a walking cliché: six feet tall, awkward, overweight, and clueless about anything in the real world. All through supper, Court sat at the end of the table looking particularly miserable.

  Dylan Collins—from Denver—was the only westerner and had just turned twenty-three. He was starting his senior year in anthro. The guy had brown hair, hazel eyes, and was aching to embark upon his first dig.

  Sam tilted his beer, took a swig, and sighed. In the TV monitors overhead, everything was sports except for one channel set on Fox News. Figured. This was deepest darkest Wyoming after all.

  “So,” Jon asked, “what happens if they don’t get this bank thing worked out? I’m already, like, broke. Amber was supposed to cover the travel out and back.”

  Dylan rocked his bottle of IPA back and forth. “It’ll get fixed. It’s a three-day weekend, right? Come Tuesday, everything’s back to normal.”

  “Listen,” Sam reminded, “we’re up on the mountain for ten days. By the time we’re back to town, it’ll be like it never happened.”

  Sam kept thinking about the reports they’d been hearing on the radio. Kirstin’s BMW had Sirius. And then people were replaying the bits of video that had come in on the phones. It wasn’t just Wyoming. The whole country was paralyzed by the credit card crisis.

  Even as Sam tried to picture how Mom and Dad were doing at The Yucatec, Jon said, “So, like, what’s happening at home?”

  Dylan used his thumbnail to peel the label off his bottle of beer. “Maybe this is kind of like COVID. Businesses either demand cash, local checks, or they simply close. Figure it will be simpler to ride it out until the banks get the problem fixed.”

  Jon stared thoughtfully at Fox News on the screen above where the muted monitor flashed from commentator to commentator. “The media couldn’t be happier. They got
their socks in a knot interviewing experts, doing stories about people caught in the middle of transactions. People pissed off where services were performed moments before the credit card machines stopped.” He grinned. “Get this: airlines are actually waiving the baggage fees. People started smashing ATMs when their cards were declined.”

  “Yeah.” Dylan leaned forward. “For whatever reason the worst has broken out in Denver. I called mom. Fight started at a grocery store in a low-income neighborhood near downtown. People were already pissed. Tempers hot over a recent police shooting. Guess it spilled into the streets. They torched an entire business district. Right in the middle of it someone with a scoped rifle started shooting at police. Twenty ended up dead, including four cops, and it’s growing.”

  Jon stared through the amber beer in his glass. “The wages of white privilege come home to roost.”

  Sam kept his mouth shut. He had his own notions about “white privilege” and “social justice”, but he came from a different world than the rest of his fellows.

  Sam checked his phone for the latest news. The president was appealing for calm, assuring the country that it was only a matter of hours before the problem would be addressed.

  “Hey, guys, listen to this: In reply to one reporter’s question, the president was quoted as saying, “Martial law is a possibility when it comes to the protection of the lives and property of law-abiding Americans.”

  “Martial law?” Jon’s voice was incredulous. “That sucks goat turds.”

  Sam continued to read: “The president keeps insisting it will only be a matter of hours before the problem is fixed. When asked about some Chinese incursion in Taiwan, she said that it was being dealt with.”

  Taiwan? Who cared about Taiwan? Sam figured the country had its own trouble. The delivery of three pizzas pretty much ended the speculation.

  Back at the Days Inn, the steely look was still on Amber’s face when Sam found her in the bar.

  “Nothing’s changed,” she told him. “Tomorrow morning we’re headed out to the Tappan Ranch and then up to the project. They’ll have this credit thing resolved long before we’re back in town for break. Then we can all hit the ATM and restock. Meanwhile, get a good night’s sleep.”

  “Works for me.”

  “Oh, Sam? You were riding with Kirstin the whole way. She say anything about the Tappans?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Just a couple of comments over supper.” Amber rubbed her face with weary hands. Sam could see the faint tracery of white scars. “We went over this in the introductory meeting back at the anthro building. No politics. The Tappans will be our hosts.”

  “Kirstin hitting the white privilege thing again?”

  “Yeah.” Amber lifted her glass of whiskey. Sipped. “The good news is that Shanteel keeps her in check.”

  “How’s that?”

  Amber shot Sam a satisfied grin. “Hard for Kirstin—given her silver-spoon background—to start preaching when Shanteel’s at the table. Shanteel gives her one of those ‘you don’t know shit, white girl’ looks, and it shuts Kirstin down like a switch.”

  Sam hitched his butt onto the next bar stool. “You rode out here with her, what’s Shanteel’s story? Why’s she here? She’s a social work major. Never had an archaeology class in her life.”

  “Looking for her Seminole and Cherokee ancestors.”

  “In Wyoming?” Sam raised a skeptical brow.

  “Yeah, well, like you said, she never had a class in North American anthro. She didn’t have what you’d call ‘a fine handle on the nuances’ of where Cherokee and Seminoles lived. But now that she’s here, she’s committed. If a little worried.”

  Sam waved the bartender away when he asked what he wanted to drink. “Shanteel’s from one of the roughest neighborhoods in Philadelphia. She has, um, issues. Especially with red-neck cowboy types. You saw her reaction in Lincoln? Over that Confederate flag and those guys in the pickup?”

  “Think she’s going to have trouble with the Tappans?”

  “Intense black woman, active in Black Lives Matter, face to face with Wyoming ranchers? Who are probably Republicans by the way.”

  “So are you.” Amber shot him a sidelong look. “Oh, relax. I’ll keep your secret.”

  “Hey, my dad and mom ran a restaurant. Running a business, dealing with the taxes, the inspections, the payoffs, the FICA, and payroll gives you a different perspective on life. But something tells me New York and Wyoming Republicans are two completely different animals. I mean, these are MAGA, God, guns, and worship the flag types, right?”

  She studied her whiskey as if some remarkable truth were hidden in its amber depths. “So, why is it that anthropologists trained in intricacies of ethnic diversity—of all people—can be so righteous when it comes to the superiority of their own moral compasses?”

  “Sure, there’s Kirstin and Shanteel, but I don’t think the rest—”

  “I miss the old days when anthro struggled—if unsuccessfully—to be an objective discipline dedicated to the understanding of human diversity and complexity. The problem with being an activist, is that you’ve got to make baseline assumptions founded on truth. With a capital T.” She hooked her fingers in quotation marks. “Which means you are nothing more than a jihadist.”

  Sam fought to keep his expression neutral.

  She gave him a dismissive look. And to be sure he understood, said, “See you in the morning. Should be a busy day.”

  “Yeah. Mañana.”

  Everyone in Sam’s room fell asleep reading the insane comments on Yik Yak and Snap Chat. And there was nothing on TV but the news video of all the problems around the country.

  Sam finally drifted off with scenes of angry demonstrations in Cleveland and Atlanta playing in his head. People were throwing bricks through bank windows.

  They Had No Idea

  Most people think it was the Chinese. Doesn’t matter, really. Whoever planned it, they had no clue what they were unleashing. The worry—especially after COVID—has always been that someone would use biological warfare, that lab-designed viruses would backfire, infecting the attackers as well as the target country. Spread into a world-wide plague that killed us all.

  The cyberattack that corrupted the banks wasn’t well thought out. Whoever infected the financial system with the malware, had no idea that it would crash the entire world.

  It was brilliant. The malware corrupted less than ten percent of the nation’s bank accounts. Just enough to sow distrust of all financial records. It was all about breaking the American people’s faith in their financial system. After COVID and the 2020 election, maybe our faith was already broken.

  — Excerpt from Breeze Tappan’s Journal.

  Chapter Three

  Sam awakened dirty-dog-tired when his iPhone dinged him Saturday morning, but part of him was relieved to be away from the nightmarish dreams.

  He checked the news: The nightmares had nothing on the actual stories. Denver was no longer the only city locked down by social convulsions.

  Well, shit. Didn’t that just cut it?

  He wondered how the folks were doing back on Long Island. All of Hempstead would be shut down. Especially at The Yucateca. No one back home paid in cash. And The Yucateca didn’t take checks.

  Call them?

  He actually tapped out the number, hesitated, and finally cleared the phone. He knew how it would end. Dad, saying, “Hey! What you doing in Wyoming? You’re out there digging up dead Indians? Git your lazy ass back here, cholo. You think it’s a stroll in the flowers running this place? And who got you into that school, anyway? We need the help, damn it.”

  Sam left Court, Jon, and Dylan asleep, yanked on yesterday’s clothes, and stepped out into the hall. True to form, he found Amber already in the restaurant, a cup of coffee cradled in her hands as if in a form of prayer. From her empty plate, she’d already eaten. This time her eyes were focused on the mounted fish and African animal heads that studded the restaurant�
��s walls.

  He pulled out the chair next to hers. “Do you ever sleep?”

  She arched a red eyebrow. “Is that a serious question?”

  “You were still up when I went to bed last night. Then you beat me here, coffee in hand, breakfast finished.”

  “Got a lot on my mind.” She shifted her grip on the coffee cup, lifted her phone, and checked the time. “Evan should be on the way. Said he’d meet us at six.”

  “He’s here?”

  Dr. Evan Holly—professor emeritus from the University of Wyoming—specialized in Shoshonean archaeology and culture. Knew more about Wyoming archaeology than anyone alive.

  Amber’s lips twitched. “Evan has a lady friend in town that he stays with. One of his old girlfriends, I think. He has a long-standing reputation in the discipline for never sticking to one female when a multitude are available.”

  “What is it about archaeologists from his generation?”

  “The last of the old patriarchs? They all drank like fish, and philandering was like a group sport. ‘Tipi creeping’ they used to call it. Maybe it was just a lustier age back before #metoo.” A faint smile. “Shyla would approve.”

  “You heard about Denver?”

  “The city’s locked down according to Fox News. Denver’s not the only place having trouble.”

  “Fox News?”

  All Sam got in return was a quirking at the corners of her mouth, as if she were strangling a smile.

  “Here he comes.” Amber pushed back her chair and stood.

  Sam did the same, turning to see Doctor Holly as he entered in a long-legged stride. The first thing that struck Sam was the man’s height: well over six feet. He wore a light-canvas shooting jacket with a patch on the right shoulder, loops for shotgun shells, and lots of pockets—most of them brimming. Beneath it he’d donned a tan button-down shirt that he’d tucked into slim-fit blue jeans held up by a colorful horsehair belt. A beadwork buckle sported a beautiful red rose on a white background.