Story code: ST-000356
Part 2: The Cost of Sabotage
I did not breathe. I did not shift my weight. I let the absolute darkness of the freezing woods swallow me, my senses narrowing down to the ragged, desperate sound of oxygen being dragged into a panicked set of lungs. The saboteur was right there, huddled behind the thick trunk of an old-growth oak just a dozen strides away. The crunch of my own boots had warned them, but they hadn’t run further. They were waiting to see if I would give up and turn back toward the floodlights of the worksite.
I gripped the knurled aluminum handle of my Maglite. My knuckles ached with the tension. The cold seeped through the soles of my work boots, but I felt none of it. All I felt was the crushing weight of that pink collection letter and the image of my mother crying at the kitchen table when the bank eventually came for her home. I stepped forward, sliding my foot carefully over the damp earth, closing the distance in silence. Five yards. Three yards.
I lunged around the side of the oak tree and clicked the heavy button on the flashlight.
The blinding beam of the Maglite cut through the pitch black, hitting a figure crouched in the frost-coated ferns. He was young-maybe twenty at most-wearing an expensive, pristine Gore-Tex jacket and a dark wool beanie. His eyes went wide, reflecting the harsh yellow light like a cornered deer. In his gloved hands, he gripped a heavy pair of bright red bolt cutters.
“Hey!” I roared, the anger I had been suppressing finally detonating.
He didn’t freeze. With a sudden, terrified shout, he scrambled backward, throwing a handful of frozen dirt and dead leaves toward my face. I turned my head, avoiding the debris, as he scrambled to his feet and swung the heavy bolt cutters wildly in my direction. The steel jaws clipped the shoulder of my canvas jacket, glancing off with a dull thud. He tried to pivot and bolt deeper into the ravine, but his aggressive hiking boots slipped on a patch of icy mud.
I didn’t give him a second chance. I dropped my shoulder and tackled him hard into the underbrush. We hit the freezing ground in a tangle of limbs. He was athletic, but he didn’t have the heavy, calloused strength of a guy who spent ten hours a day wrestling rebar and moving earth. I wrenched the bolt cutters from his grip, tossing them into the dark, and pinned him face-down in the dirt. I jammed my knee squarely into the center of his spine-hard enough to hold him, but not enough to break him.
“Get off me!” he screamed, his voice cracking. “Get off! You corporate fascist!”
I grabbed the collar of his expensive jacket, hauled him up from the mud, and slammed him back against the trunk of the oak tree. I kept my forearm pressed tight against his collarbone, pinning him in the spotlight of my dropped flashlight, which now illuminated us from the ground.
“You think you’re saving the world?” I spat, my voice shaking with a rage that surprised even me. “You think you hit some billionaire developer tonight?”
“I stopped the machines!” he gasped, staring at me with defiant, terrified eyes. “This old-growth forest was here before your greedy employers, and we’re not letting you tear it down for luxury condos. We know how to hurt their bottom line!”
“Their bottom line?” The words tore out of my throat, raw and jagged. “The development company doesn’t own those machines! They lease them from guys like me! You didn’t hurt the corporation, you idiot. You just destroyed my crew’s week. You just cost me three days of wages, plus the penalty the general contractor is going to hit me with for leaving the site unsecured.”
He swallowed hard, trying to maintain his righteous glare, but it was already faltering. “The… the corporation will reimburse you. They have insurance.”
“I am a subcontractor!” I yelled, stepping closer, letting him see the desperate, dark circles under my eyes. “If I don’t work, I don’t get paid. And I owe eight hundred and fifty dollars in five days. Not to a bank. To the medical collection agency that is threatening to put a lien on my elderly parents’ house because my sister died of leukemia and left us drowning in her hospital bills. That was the money I was going to earn today and tomorrow.”
The activist stopped struggling. The color drained from his face, leaving him looking sickly pale in the harsh up-lighting of the Maglite. His mouth opened, but no words came out. The defiant eco-warrior vanished, replaced by a college kid who had suddenly realized the true, devastating impact of his blind crusade.
“I…” he stammered, looking at my frayed canvas jacket and grease-stained hands. “I didn’t know. The online forum said the developers absorb all equipment sabotage costs. I swear, I didn’t know it fell on you.”
“Well, it does,” I said, my chest heaving as the adrenaline began to crash, leaving behind the suffocating reality of my situation. With my free hand, I pulled my phone from my pocket. “And the only way I avoid the financial penalty for negligence is if I hand the police the vandal who breached the fence. You’re going to pay for my sister’s debt, one way or another.”
I unlocked the screen and punched in the numbers 9-1-1.
“Wait! Stop!” The kid’s hands flew up, grabbing my wrist. His panic was no longer defensive; it was frantic and desperate. “Don’t call them! Please!”
“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t,” I growled.
“Because if you call the police, you still lose your house!” he pleaded, his breathing rapid and shallow. “Look, we used an encrypted chat to coordinate this. We crossed state lines. If you call the cops for heavy machinery sabotage, they have to report it up. The FBI gets involved under federal eco-terrorism statutes. I’ve seen it happen to other sites we hit. They will lock down this entire property as a federal crime scene.”
I froze, my thumb hovering a fraction of an inch above the green call button.
“Think about it,” he begged, sensing my hesitation. “The feds will string up yellow tape around everything. No one will be allowed to touch the excavator or the skid steer for at least a month while they investigate. The contractor will declare a force majeure clause to break the timeline. You won’t be able to flush the fuel lines, you won’t be able to dig, and you absolutely will not get paid in five days. You turn me in, and your parents lose their home anyway.”
The freezing wind howled through the barren branches above, biting at the sweat on my neck. I stared at the screen of my phone. He was right about the bureaucracy; I had seen jobs halted for weeks over minor safety violations. A federal investigation would freeze the earth-moving operation indefinitely.
“If you let me go,” the activist whispered, his eyes darting toward the cut fence in the distance, “I have my truck parked a mile up the logging road. I have a siphon pump, heavy-duty filters, and a compressor. I can help you flush the sugar out of the tanks right now, before the sun comes up.”
I looked from my illuminated screen to the terrified kid. He was offering a lifeline, but trusting the very saboteur who had just ruined my site felt like stepping off a cliff in the dark. My thumb trembled over the dial button.