1

Well, Your Honor, I really appreciate this last chance to set the record straight. Like I said up on the witness stand this morning, I was born Vivian Marley Hobson-Dawson but always went by Viv Dawson till I changed my name to Wheeler when I got married twenty years ago the seventeenth of this next month.

You already know about me being a landscaper down around Seal Rock when the M-virus hit town nearly five long years ago, the Dirge torched our neighborhood and killed Uncle Trey in cold blood for trying to protect some poor Zama, and we all turned into DPs scattered to the four winds.

You gotta believe me, please—I am not that gunrunner the prosecutor keeps saying I am. I know he’s doing the best job he can in these troubled times, but you got the wrong woman, plain and simple.

The real Sunny set me up to take the fall for her right after the Marines rolled into Waldport back at the end of July. She picked me out of that hornet’s nest in the safe haven bulging at the seams where me and Jake were living hand-to-mouth day in, day out same as everybody else. Then she hooked me with that good Samaritan bait of hers after hearing me tell a Guard how the two of us got separated during the food riot out on the Spit.

Like I keep telling anybody bothering to listen, all you gotta do is track down my husband, and he’ll vouch for me. Hope and pray he’s all right ’cause I haven’t heard a peep from him since. That’s not like him, you know, leaving me in a tough spot like this for close to three months without being able to find me or at least get word to me—even if I am a couple hundred miles from home and the Meltdown’s only now easing up enough for those surviving to start pulling things back together here and there.

If any of my kids were around, they’d vouch for me too, but I got no idea where they are either. All I can do is pray they’re safe and sound too while I wait to hear from ’em like a whole lot of others are still doing nowadays. Thought I was gonna go crazy not knowing what happened to everybody when me and Jake were holing up in the safe haven, but that was nothing compared to being locked up alone here in this miserable cell carved out of a supply closet in a rowdy jailhouse full of shameless men with all their howling and cussing and sinful ways and him not in arm’s reach.

And then there’s all the overtime the hangmen keep racking up on the yard right out that barred window in full view not even a stone’s throw from here. Painful enough laying awake half the night worrying about what’s coming down the pike, but hearing all these guys whimpering in their sleep makes me wonder how come I’m not a total basket case like Gonzo Willy was till he finally met his Maker, bless his soul.

Anyhow, that rotten Sunny knocked me out cold with a fish billy or some such thing, stripped me naked, dressed me in her clothes, and planted a knife and a pistol on me. Then she messed with my ID to make it look suspicious and got a lowlife to swear to those bounty hunters I was her ’cause of that crock about the J tattooed over my heart meaning something in her life instead of my husband’s initial.

Sure as I’m sitting here on this flea-bitten, mangy excuse for a mattress, she’s hiding out someplace cozy, laughing like a loon about pulling the wool over all your eyes and living free and clear.

As the Lord is my witness, I’m doing everything I can to help you see the truth, including going through with this special testimony like you told me to. Used to get tongue-tied just leaving a message on somebody’s hub, but blathering on at this little recorder Keera loaned me before I got hauled back down here a bit ago makes that seem like small peanuts.

She says the bottom line is stay focused on telling the truth so you’ll turn me loose and I can find everybody and get back home and try picking up the pieces as best . . .

2

I’m back again. Guess you already know that, huh?

Sorry about having to stop ’cause of getting so choked up. My hands were still shaking something awful, and my stomach was nothing but knots after what happened at the trial and the way this is all going.

Then I started in thinking about . . .

3

OK, I can do this thing, I really can. I was hoping to hold off till Chaplain Eddy makes his evening rounds so he could help me out, but Gaines says I got no time to lose.

All right then, if I kept from bawling like a baby there in court while that prosecutor ripped me up one side and down the other for not being who he thinks I am and those vile men lied about me being Sunny, I can grit my teeth and keep going till I need another breather.

Keera says to tell you about my life all over again—what happened to everybody I know, how me and my husband fell into being DPs and got stuck in Waldport to begin with, how that conniving Sunny tricked me, you, and the rest of creation, and how I wound up all alone inside this lousy cage that’s not much bigger than I am tall.

No doubt you’ve been hearing all kinds of people claiming they’re innocent what with back-to-back trials going on around here like they are, but I hope and pray you believe me at day’s end and won’t punish me anymore for something I had no part in.

Bad enough suffering at the hands of those ruthless bounty hunters after I came to while they were tasing and strip-searching me in plain sight before some Marines put a stop to that abuse and tossed me in the hold of a Coast Guard cutter like a burlap sandbag.

But then there was the long, brutal quarantine trip up here with a bunch of foul-mouthed Dirge losers chained a few feet away whining every other minute they were awake—and me nursing a doozy of a headache and itching like no other all over—before spending months on end as the only woman prisoner on this whole godforsaken jailhouse floor.

You gotta believe me, please. I don’t wanna hang for somebody else’s crimes. I was just in the wrong place at the . . .

4

So like I keep saying, my name’s Viv Wheeler, and I was born and raised down in Seal Rock after my folks moved over to the coast from Hermiston when they . . .

Hold on a sec. All that racket cutting through the usual hubbub around here and trying to drown me out is the cellblock door busting open.

And here comes that public defender of mine waving a fistful of papers and making a beeline for me.

Praise the Lord and pass that release order she kept asking you for so I can hightail it out of this devil’s workshop and take my first breath of . . .

5

Well, shit on my shoes and make me dance.

Keera stormed out of here awhile ago after giving me one wicked tongue lashing for lying to her, you, that old prosecutor, and the rest of the world. She kept fanning my face with that damn NGS report of yours popping up out of nowhere after the fact, getting all high and mighty in her lawyer way how it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt I’m the one Mr. Barebones squawked about like a scrub jay there in court even though nobody’s got my eyeprint or voiceprint or earmark on file and my fingerprints and body scan don’t match. Then she laced into me how I gotta knock off that Viv bullshit and tell the truth for a change, pull the stupid TP plugs out of my nose, clear the frog out of my throat once and for all, and record this testimony for real.

She said that report pissed you off so bad it was all she could do to talk you out of hanging me on the spot yourself—along with the poor guy tasked with giving me that worthless lie detector brain scan I passed the day I got here. Wasn’t his fault, you know.

Anyhow, sorry about putting everybody through the wringer like that, but I figured my choices were few and far between.

I know that’s a tough sell with you sitting pretty like you are and me admitting to lying like a rug up till now, but if you could get so much as a glimpse through my eyes of what I had to do to survive the Meltdown, you’d have a whole different . . .

6

Truth be told, I had no idea my scam was gonna last anywhere near this long. Can’t blame Keera for getting her bowels in an uproar over swallowing my lies hook, line, and sinker and standing up for me this morning like the dedicated PD she is.

Hell, maybe she just played her part too, you never know. Whichever way it was, she sure did a fine job with what I fed her, reaming those two lying potlickers’ asses testifying against me and objecting every time that old prosecutor even hinted about me not being Viv.

Little good it did me in the long run though—burning our gear, scuttling Viewfinder, and giving Yo-Yo away to cover my tracks. All that rigmarole for nothing since a couple FBI agents with too damn much time on their hands snooped out my trail upriver and down till they found one of my caches I couldn’t get to and matched my DNA and whatnot.

And so much for all the blood and sweat I put into acting like some innocent thing conned by a fugitive with a bounty on her head. Least I didn’t go through with chopping off my braid again like I thought about doing more than once.

But hindsight’s twenty-twenty like everybody knows, so I still say pretending to be somebody else was worth a shot what with all the confusion over who’s who and records and such. Not like I had a boatload of options after one of my river customers dropped a dime on me to those douchebag bounty hunters in the haven while I was finding a good home for Yo-Yo with a huddle of sorrowful kids in need of more protection than a dog could ever give ’em.

Well, my luck took one nasty nosedive on me back then and again now ’cause a day or two more and I might’ve made it out of this shitpit. Can’t tell you how much I was looking forward to walking scot-free and wearing something other than this fumigated jumpsuit that’s so old you can’t hardly tell it started off as khaki and you know it’s only being held together by the heartache of the ones wearing it before you—especially those sporting a noose on it like a collar for their last breath on this earth.

Course you’re the only one to say whether or not you would’ve taken the bait at the end of the day if that damn evidence hadn’t showed up.

Anyhow, after all that time being Viv, I’m gonna kinda miss her. I mean, I made up a fake husband, kids, brothers and sisters, a dead uncle, plus a whole slew of other bullshit, including how she went mostly deaf in her left ear from an infection as a baby instead of a 9-mil going off right up against it nearly four years ago.

The real Viv was a bit older than me when she worked at the diner a few months to get away from that peckerhead husband of hers till he went through rehab for the umpteenth time and they both went back to some dairy farm along the Coquille, I think.

Let me tell you, keeping all those lies straight was a royal pain in the ass. But that was a drop in the bucket compared to acting like some Goody Two-shoes minding her Ps and Qs and talking to Chaplain Eddy about salvation and forgiveness and all.

Sure hope I get the chance to sit down with that good man so I can make amends even though it can’t be the first time anybody’s ever tried bamboozling him here in this hellhole.

I gotta admit it does feel good now that my tongue’s loosening back up to its regular way of talking, if you know what I mean.

Which reminds me, go ahead and pardon my French even if you don’t pardon me. Get the clerk or whoever to cut out all my cussing after I’m done with this thing if you got a mind to ’cause it’s just something I do, no disrespect. Keeping it clean was the toughest part about being Viv, especially there in court with that old scrub jay ripping into me like there was no tomorrow and me having to stay tight-lipped all the while.

But don’t you worry about me dropping f-bombs ’cause I quit cold turkey more than nineteen years ago after me and Jordy . . .

7

From here on out, it’s the whole truth and nothing but, so help me God. Dollars to donuts, after hearing my deep truth you’ll wind up wishing I really was that mooncalf landscaper waiting for her other half to bail her out of a tight spot.

Well, like Little Mom used to say, when it’s time to eat crow, heap on the salt. So here goes nothing—with me holding my right hand up in the air like I was back on the witness stand, only this time my left’s covering Jordy’s tatt over my heart.

8

My real name’s Pearl Fields, but from that first November of the Meltdown till I fired up my Viv number going on three months ago everybody called me by my river name—Sunny.

Now, that ought to make that old prosecutor smile for a change seeing as he wanted me to confess that so bad this morning he looked for all the world like a little kid about to piss himself right then and there.

I tried not to laugh every time he called me Sunny the Gunrunner ’cause nobody else ever did. And with my lawyer calling me Mrs. Wheeler the whole time, I thought I might bust out some split personalities like Gonzo Willy did at the drop of a hat.

Anyhow, I spent the better part of the past four years traveling upriver and down in a drift boat bartering for most any goods my customers wanted. But no matter what those two lying potlickers said in a bid to get themselves off the hook, I never once trafficked in drugs, sex, kill pills, or long pig.

I traded in food, fish, supplies of every kind, weapons, and ammo—and that’s a fact.

Did more than my fair share of good, I’m not ashamed to say even if it sounds like I’m sugarcoating my stake in it all. Couldn’t count the DPs I helped slip into Waldport past those scuzzbag fenders calling themselves the Ketch.

Like you know, they were the ones snagging kids and women from the haven and elsewhere and smuggling ’em upriver for their sex slave operation.

I messed with that horseshit every opening I saw, paying ransom and getting word to the Guard anytime it worked out.

Tell you what, when those Army Rangers swooped in a year ago this past June and rescued all the prisoners down around Digger Mountain and dusted every last Ketch asshole there to a man—may all their souls rot in hell—I couldn’t have been happier unless I’d pulled the trigger myself.

And I lent a hand to all the Zamas I crossed paths with and helped ’em hide out. Hell, I even set up a secret trade route so a few with nerve enough could risk the trip from Keller Creek to the Alsea. Not many others can lay claim to doing much of anything for those poor souls since most everybody else stayed as far away from the virus as they could for fear of getting bit by it or punished by Dirge-fenders.

Then there’s all the medic duty I fell into. Had to deal with everything from food poisoning to scurvy to bullet holes to stab wounds to machete hacks. Even worked on unluckies with their hands and legs blown off before hauling ’em on downriver and sneaking those surviving my shoddy tourniquets into the haven.

Bear in mind being a self-taught EMT out there during the Meltdown was a tough row to hoe, especially when supplies ran thin. That’s why I studied up on med plants like old man’s beard and Oregon grape and ginger root and weed and what have you. Breathed a sigh of relief whenever the Red Cross or DWB set up a field hospital even though none of ’em lasted long for one reason or another.

Had to play midwife more times than I wish too, doing my level best to help welcome those precious things into that batshit crazy world.

And I drug more bodies out of the river and bushes and tents than you could shake a stick at and tried giving ’em proper burial after they got offed and dumped like trash or did themselves in or died of disease or starvation—may all their souls be at God’s right hand.

Bet my eyeteeth you never dug a grave in rocky soil with a camp shovel and muscled down in a shit-covered, bloated corpse crawling with maggots and spewing rank gas and foul blood out of every hole possible.

Well, I sure have—about enough to fill a mass grave in some Nipah hotspot, thank you very much. Guess you can get a ballpark figure from all the camera work me and Jordy did and the potter’s fields and Zama massacres I marked on those maps, huh?

In fact, instead of Sunny the Gunrunner that old prosecutor ought to call me Sunny the Gravedigger. But that wouldn’t fit in with his hang ’em high message, now would it?

There, damn it all to hell anyhow, I admitted who I really am for all the world to know.

If Little Mom was alive today, she’d treat me like anybody else she thought had what was coming to ’em ’cause she was always primed to pass judgment faster than ninety to the dozen. She’d shake her head, roll her eyes, tsk-tsk like a warm cricket, and grumble, “Just deserts.”

Can’t tell you how many times I heard her go off on somebody with her usual rant about karma and ramble right on into that English teacher wannabe lecture of hers how just deserts is spelled like the bone-dry places you die in without water, not the dry-ass Bundt cakes your grandma brings to potlucks.

So do me a favor if you give me the thumbs-down, will you? Swap out the gallows for a firing squad.

I mean, Mr. Barebones kept harping on about how chances are some of the hardware I sold upriver folks wound up in the hands of bad guys fighting each other and those stuck in-between, right? Part of what he said does make sense—there’s no way of knowing if any of the guns and ammo I traded right alongside your garden-variety goods ever got turned on innocent people.

Course he wouldn’t believe in a month of Sundays I never pulled the trigger on anybody except for self-defense and . . .

9

Odds are you wanna hang me like that loudmouth Dirge-fender down the way this morning. Least he knew your decision when he got his supper last night. He launched straightaway into his take on the same old, same old mewling with something like, “No . . . no . . . wait. This damn DBC cake’s gotta be for somebody else. Please, I’m begging you.”

I wasn’t here in this hellhole for more than two hours before hearing about that cake. Being the only woman prisoner in a whole cellblock stuffed to the gills means not playing Sardines with a bunch of asshats in a regular cage till they take the long drop and the handful somehow avoiding it get shipped off after sentencing to make room for the steady flow of newbies. But I still gotta put up with all their yammering even though the guards try keeping a lid on it as best they can.

One thing about the goings-on inside this place flying under the radar maybe is how the kitchen crew gives you a heads-up you’re at the end of your rope, no joke. Some saps drawing short straws piss and moan about their lot in life and not standing up in court or picking their last meal like back in the day, but that kinda sniveling goes over like a lead fart.

See, a cheese omelet and Potatoes O’Brien for breakfast means your number’s up at sunset while poached Chinook and egg noodles for supper means you got till sunrise.

It’s anybody’s guess why the cooks go to all the trouble of making something special when most of what we eat is slop barely fit for hogs. Who knows? Could be somebody with enough clout wants to feel better about themselves when the Meltdown’s all said and done.

Craziest part’s getting your very own mini DBC cake—as in Death by Chocolate—along with a little noose in red piping.

How’s that for a wicked sense of humor?

Hope I never find out if it’s anywhere near as good as . . .

10

Like I was saying, that’s why they call it DBC cake in case you’re wondering. That is, if you’re still awake there after another tough day in court, more likely than not kicking back at home in your easy chair with AR specs on and a beer in hand.

Anyhow, back to last night with that Dirge-fender caterwauling about being too young to die and how he was innocent and his DBC cake had to be for somebody else and blah, blah, blah.

One of his cellmates must’ve got fed up ’cause I heard some serious scuffling, then it got quiet as it ever gets till dawn when the pallbearers drug his sorry ass out of here—pallbearers, that’s what we call the guards taking you out to the yard to cash in your chips.

The loudmouth made up for lost time with all his blubbering about his right to a jury trial and the evils of martial law till the hangmen slapped a hood over his head, Chaplain Eddy said a few words, and the doofus took the long drop so the rest of us could breathe easier.

Gotta tell you, whoever came up with the bright idea of keeping me locked up alone inside this lousy jail cell that went from a sweltering oven at the end of July to a walk-in freezer here of late sure knows how to rub salt in my wounds.

Bad enough being the only woman in this earsplitting shitpit for months on end not counting Huzjak, but then you go and add injury to insult by tormenting me day in, day out with being in smelling distance of a big old river like the Columbia and all its feeders. Every time the wind shifts and clears out some of the god-awful stench and that trail of cheap woody perfume through the wide-open, barred windows on either end of the block, I smell tidewater and fish and more than you’d ever wanna know.

I swear even pent-up in this damn maze of a rathole I can still tell when it’s slack tide or spring tide or neap tide. A couple weeks ago I felt late summer slipping into early fall and another season of record-breaking high water coming our way, sure as I’m sitting here. Lay of the land might be different from the Coast Range down around home, but all I gotta do is close my eyes, and I’m back out on the Alsea before the Meltdown.

And no lie, every morning I wake up thinking about it—Jordy’s always with me, of course—and daydream about it till I fall asleep and dream some more.

But the worst part’s being on ground level with the gallows right out there in my sight line. Anytime a guy gets strung up—which you know better than anybody happens like clockwork around here—I feel the life getting choked out of me all over again.

I turn away and cover my good ear against the sound of creaking rope and pinch my nose to block the smell of doom, but that death dance in the gloaming light always draws me in what with their feet flailing at eye level and so many of their tent poles rising up under those baggy jumpsuits.

Can’t believe how long it takes me to get my . . .

11

Keera says you probably figure me telling the truth about what I had to go through like this is gonna make me come to my senses in a flash—what Little Mom called a lightning bolt moment. That’s all fine and good, but if I wind up with a noose around my neck, nothing else means diddly-squat.

Any which way you slice it, I’m getting the short end of the stick for doing whatever I could to survive the Meltdown like a whole lot of others did and would’ve done if they’d been in my shoes—including you—left out to dry like we were with all the other horseshit going on.

Guess none of that matters now ’cause you want my life story start to finish and that’s exactly what I’m gonna dish up, come hell or high water. So here’s the skinny on me, the real me this time.

Can’t blame you for being suspicious after I tried conning you with that innocent refugee line nobody other than Chaplain Eddy and my own lawyer seemed to nibble on, if she even did.

But there’s one thing about me you can bet your bottom dollar on. When I’m cornered like I am right now with no place to turn, I face the music and sing along as best I can.

You already know it’s gonna have a raft of heartache in tow ’cause of all the unluckies like me you heard about holding the line for close to four years and the pictures you saw of those that didn’t, so I doubt you’ll be surprised by much of anything.

Course what the hell do I know about you? Nothing—while you wanna know everything about me.

Well, this is your wheelhouse not mine, so that’s just how it goes.

Shit, I don’t even have anybody to carp at about having to carry on a one-sided conversation with a damn gizmo inside this closet of a cell reeking of outhouse so far from home except for you maybe listening.

How’s that for pitiful?

So hold onto that fancy robe if you’re still wearing it ’cause here comes the confession you ordered me to make before Huzjak bodychecked me out of court this morning.

12

Just for the record, my full name’s Pearly Everlasting Crimson Mountain Meadow Celestial Moonshadow Fields.

Yeah, my folks were hippie throwbacks, what can I say? They gave me that gaggle of names starting with some flowers around their yurt up on the Idaho Panhandle and named my little brother Mount Breitenbach—everybody called him Bach though. And as if that wasn’t nutty enough, they gave us each our own last names to boot.

Don’t remember much of those early years apart from running free in the woods with a pack of kids, watching Little Mom give birth to Bach, and seeing my dad Pezi’s body after his pickup skidded off a logging road and broke through thin ice on a nameless lake on the Fourteenth of February, 1994—may his soul be at God’s right hand.

Before long Little Mom moved the three of us on down to Georgia to live in a dank, moldy canvas wall tent on her family spread off the road between Molena and Zebulon.

But I guess my granddad Big Jewels couldn’t deal with her playing that beat-up mandolin and crying all the time about losing the love of her life, to say nothing of Bach being as wild as a Tuckernuck steer.

Sugar, my grandma, wanted to keep just me to raise like my dad’s side of the family put out on the table for both us kids, but neither of those ideas stood a snowball’s chance in hell of happening.

So Little Mom hauled us from boyfriend to boyfriend, job to job, place to place.

Let’s see, after bouncing around Georgia like ping-pong balls, we did likewise through Alabama, South Carolina, New York, Maine, Indiana, Colorado, Wyoming, California, Alaska, and even over to Ireland for most of a year where poor Bach met his Maker—may his soul be at God’s right hand—before trying out almost every town along the Oregon Coast.

The two of us finally put down roots in Waldport at the tail end of August 2000 after she met my worthless piece of shit stepdad—may that gallows bird’s soul be rotting in hell.