Nouueaux venus lieu basty sans defence,
Occuper la place par lors inhabitable:
Prez, maisons, champs, villes, predre a plaisance,
Faim peste, guerre, arpen long labourage.
Newcomers, place built without defense,
Place occupied then uninhabitable:
Meadows, houses, fields, towns to take at pleasure,
Famine, plague, war, extensive land arable.
Almost three weeks after D-day, a pickup pulled into the drive. The same police officer that had manned the roadblock five days earlier stepped out. I had been working with Ken, pulling the remains of the soiled and smelly carpet out of the den when I heard the vehicle and saw him outside the window. I quickly stepped outside. I wasn’t trying to be polite. I just remembered that questionnaire and didn’t want him to see any of the food and supplies we had stacked in the kitchen.
“Good morning, Officer.” I wiped my hand on my jeans before extending it. “What can we do for you?”
“This where Amber Peddy lives?” he drawled, ignoring my hand. “I need to speak to her, if you don’t mind.”
I dropped my hand and my smile. In the most formal voice I could muster, I asked, “Could I tell her what this is about?” What I really meant was, “Do you mind telling me where the hell you get off swaggering up here like you own the place and demanding to see my mother-in-law?”
He caught it, but my businesslike tone left him no opening to call offense. He looked me over disdainfully, as if trying to determine whether or not I deserved a real answer. Evidently, I didn’t. “Sorry, Mr. Dawcett, but that really ain’t no concern of yours.” He started to step past me.
I moved in front of him, less worried about manners than about keeping him outside. “I’m sure it isn’t. But the house is a wreck right now, so if you’ll just wait right here, I’d be happy to run and get her for you.” Those questions kept running through my mind. What provisions do you have stored? What medical supplies? I simply couldn’t let him into the house.
He reached down and pointedly put his hand on his holster. The meaning was clear. “Mr. Dawcett, would you please step aside?”
I wasn’t about to, and it looked like it was going to come down to a more physical confrontation. I was close enough that I knew that he would never get the pistol out of its holster if he tried, and I had seen the way he carried himself. I was certain that I could take him without any difficulty. The problem was, with or without that attitude, he still represented law and order. Could I afford to make such an enemy?
Ken stepped out of the front door at that point, looked warily at our standoff in the front yard, and saved me from having to make such a decision. “Problem, Leeland?”
“Yeah. Officer…” I glanced quickly down at his badge. “Kelland seems to be very eager to speak to Amber. Would you mind getting her?”
“Sure thing.” Ken left quickly.
Kelland stared at me through his shades. He must have seen he wasn’t going to be able to bully his way past me, but now he was sure I was trying to hide something. So he tried a different approach. “There some reason you don’t want me to come in? Hot as it is, seems like that’d be the hospitable thing to do.”
“Officer Kelland, I don’t know what I’ve done to piss you off so much, but ever since the first time you saw me, you seem to have had it in for me. You were rude at the roadblock, and you were rude when you stepped out of your truck just now. Now I realize, as far as you’re concerned, I’m city folk, and I’ve got no business in your town. I also realize that ever since those bombs fell, everyone has been under a lot of stress. But I’ve got news for you, Amber is family, and technically, I’m her guest. So she’s the only one around here I have to please. And she’s the only one that can tell me to leave. Until that happens, my family and I are here to stay. That means that this is now my home.
“Now, I’ll grant you that things have changed a lot, but not so much that you can come up here flashing a badge and a gun and forcing your way into people’s homes.” I stopped for a second to catch my breath and let him absorb the implications of what I had said.
“I’m not city folk any more, Kelland. I live here. I’m Rejas folk. And you might need to get to know me a little before you start playing your little mind games.” I glanced at his right hand, still resting on his holster. “So if you think for one freaking minute that I’m going to invite you into this house with your sorry attitude, you can just jump up my ass and fight for air.”
I turned my back on him and walked to the house. I wasn’t sure if he would get the message, but where I grew up, to turn your back on someone like that was one of the worst insults imaginable. It showed nothing but contempt for anything they could do.
Of course, I also watched his reflection in the front window as I left. I saw the curtains in that window move slightly as I stepped up to the front porch, so I knew that someone was watching us from inside. Sure enough, Amber met me at the front door as I came in with Ken beside her holding the deer rifle.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “What’s he doing here?”
“Wish I knew.” I shrugged. “He wasn’t real inclined to tell me much, and I didn’t exactly help matters any.”
“How’s that?”
“I think I insulted him a little.”
“Gee, thanks. So now that you’ve buttered him up, I’m supposed to go talk to him?”
“You want me to go out there with you?”
She peeked out the window again at the fuming Officer Kelland. “No thanks,” she said dryly, “It looks like you’ve helped enough.”
“Would you rather I invited him in?”
She sighed. “No, I guess not. But I’m not looking forward to this.” Taking another deep breath, she opened the front door. “Well, I guess I’d better find out what’s going on.”
“We’ll keep an eye on you.” Ken raised the rifle as she left.
I smiled. “What’s the matter, Ken? You act like you don’t trust the nice officer.”
He didn’t even bother turning back to face me. “That’s the sumbitch that stuck a gun in my face. See if it doesn’t change your attitude about a person.”
I tried to hear what they said, but Amber and Kelland spoke too softly. At any rate, the discussion lasted only a few minutes before Kelland turned, got back in his truck, and left.
We both pounced on Amber when she came back inside. “Well, what did he want?”
“They need me at the hospital,” she replied solemnly. “I wrote on my form that I was a retired nurse, and now it seems they’re swamped with people suffering from radiation poisoning. They need any experienced medical personnel they can get. Fifty-seven deaths and over three hundred hospitalized.”
It was grim news, but we had known it was coming. We also knew it was going to get worse. Rejas was a pretty small town of less than ten thousand people. It also happened to be the site of two hospitals, each with about two hundred beds. Evidently, they were already doubling up.
She looked me in the eyes. “One of the deaths was the chief of police. That means the officer you were oh, so charming to is now the head authority figure around here.” I groaned.
“You picked the wrong man to mess with this time, Leeland.”
She reached up and ran her finger across the scarring line at my throat. “I would have thought you’d know better by now.” She sighed. “Well, no use crying about it now that it’s done. I need to get to the hospital. Would you mind if I took the van? There’s no telling when I’ll get away, and it’s not like I can call you when I’m ready to go.”
“No problem. When are you planning to leave?”
“There’s no reason I can’t go now,” she said. “There’s nothing here someone else can’t do. I’d be more useful at the hospital.”
I couldn’t argue with her logic. She was useful at home, but medicine had been her chosen field for many years, and I couldn’t expect her to ignore its call.
I turned to get the keys from where they hung on the wall in the kitchen. Debra handed them to me before I had completely turned around. She, Cindy, and the kids had all come in the back way to see what the commotion was about. Walking in on the end of my conversation with Amber, Debra had known with that special sixth sense of hers what would be needed.
I passed the keys to my mother-in-law. “Take care,” I told her. “We’re going to need you back here.” Not very eloquent, but for the life of me, I couldn’t think of anything else to say. It was the first time any one of us had been separated from the others. It seemed like one of those occasions that should be remembered as significant. But in reality, it was simply Amber going to work. Everyone else gathered around for hugs and goodbyes.
Five minutes later, she was gone.
July 4
The next day, trouble visited our neck of the woods. It wasn’t subtle, like the dangers we had begun to accept as a part of every day life. We didn’t need our PRDs to detect it, or to take extra precautions with our garbage to prevent it. It was loud, and we knew it immediately for the threat that it was.
A short volley of gunfire, followed by several seconds of silence. It sounded like four or five guns being fired at random. Nearly fifteen seconds passed, then more gunfire. Sporadic, this time. Five or six shots, then silence. Then, nearly a dozen shots. And again, silence. It went on like that for nearly two minutes before the short echoes of the last shot were absorbed by the forest.
We were all working on a homemade waterwheel we planned to erect over the small creek that ran down from the spring. If it worked, we would soon have fresh running water and electricity. As soon as we heard those gunshots, however, our priorities shifted radically.
Actually, that wasn’t quite true. When we first heard them, none of us wanted to believe what we were hearing. It wasn’t until the second volley that Megan asked what the rest of us had been too afraid to. “Are those gunshots?”
Ken got to his feet first. “Let’s get everyone inside.” None of us argued as we scrambled for the house.
“Megan, get the rifles out of the closet,” I ordered. “Extra magazines for each.” She nodded and ran ahead. “Ken, are you any good with a rifle?”
“Six years in the Marines and several years of hunting. Good enough?”
I was surprised. He’d never given any indication. “Yeah, how about you, Cindy?”
She shrugged. “It’s been a long time, but Ken got me interested when we first got married. He thought he could get me to go hunting with him, but I couldn’t see shooting defenseless animals and-”
Ken interrupted, “Cindy, we don’t have time for your life history, baby. Just a yes or no.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Yes, I can shoot.”
We entered the house to find Megan laying various firearms out on the floor of the den-dad’s old.30–06 deer rifle, a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun Amber kept around for “shootin’ varmints,” and a.300 Winchester Magnum, a rifle with more kick than a mule.
In addition, we had the spoils of our encounter with Larry and company: a Winchester.22, the AR 15, two Kalashnikov semi-autos, and the grand prize, a old 9mm carbine with a helical coil magazine that held one hundred rounds. It had been Larry’s personal weapon. Mine now.
Four pistols also lay on the couch, as well as the one Megan now wore on her belt. All in all, not a bad little arsenal.
There was no question as to whether or not we would investigate. We couldn’t afford to wait and see what happened. After all, that had been a lot of gunfire, and we were in no position to call the police.
“Okay,” I said. “Who goes, and who stays?”
Zachary piped up. “I wanna go!” Quick in the way of an eight-year-old boy, he turned toward the pistols on the couch.
Debra caught his shoulder. “The kids and I will stay here and watch things while you’re gone.” She knelt in front of Zachary. “Zach, I need you to stay here with me. I’m too scared to stay here alone.”
Zachary frowned, probably sensing he was being manipulated. “But I need to go with Dad.”
Debra turned to me, her eyes asking for help.
“Zach, come here.” I said it conspiratorially, appealing to the part of every child that wanted to be an adult. “Your mom won’t admit it, but she’s afraid of guns. She’s probably going to need some help loading them. Can you do me a favor and look after her?”
Still appearing unsure, but willing to be talked into it, he finally agreed. “Well, okay.”
“I’ll stay with them,” Cindy added.
“I’m going.” Megan sounded as if she expected an argument. In truth, I had mixed feelings. On one hand, she was my daughter, just sixteen years old, and I couldn’t help feeling that I shouldn’t allow her to go into a potentially dangerous situation. On the other hand, however, I would be happy to have her help. After all, I had trained her myself, and she had held up under the pressure of a tight situation to save my bacon once already.
“Fine. Ken?”
“I’m going,” he said. “You’ll need me to show you the back trails through the woods.”
I nodded and picked up the carbine. “Everybody, take your pick.” I headed back to the bedroom that Debra and I shared. I reached under the bed and pulled out two canvas sport bags, then quickly stripped down to my underwear. One was my trusty bag of tricks, which I immediately dug into and began strapping my hidden arsenal into place.
When finished, I reached into the other bag and pulled out several pairs of camouflage pants, shirts, jackets, and gloves. That bag contained all of mine and Megan’s old paintball gear. Still in the bag were a couple of protective face masks, several safety goggles, a dozen smoke bombs, web belts with plenty of pouches, two paintball guns, and other paintball paraphernalia.
I slipped on camouflage pants, a t-shirt, and a jacket over most of my toys, until I was dressed much as I had been on the drive out from Houston, except camouflaged from head to toe. I also grabbed half of the smoke bombs and stuffed them into a pouch on my web belt. Each one would put out a huge cloud of thick white smoke when you pulled the ring on the side. They had been a lot of fun when playing paintball and worked well in thick brush.
I left the room in a hurry. “Megan,” I called, “your cammies are on the bed in our room. Make it fast!” She grabbed one of the Kalashnikovs and headed for the bedroom.
I turned to Ken. “There are some more cammies in the bedroom. When she comes out, why don’t you see if any of them will fit you?”
Ken waved and went back to coordinating the defense of the house with Cindy and Debra. With the rest of us leaving, it would be up to the women to defend the homestead if anything happened. It quickly became obvious that Ken knew more about firearms than I ever would.
He had never mentioned his hitch in the military during our two week incarceration in the shelter. They were evidently memories he preferred to forget, but he hadn’t forgotten the knowledge of weapons he’d acquired. He went from Debra to Cindy, recommending weapons and positions for defense of the house. I just watched, listened, and learned.
Debra had a problem with depth perception, so she got the.30–06 with the telescopic sight for long range where she could take her time in aiming. If any action began to get close, she would have to switch to the twelve-gauge so the spread could help compensate for her vision.
Cindy got the Kalashnikov that Megan hadn’t taken. They had enough ammunition to take on a small army, and Ken showed Zachary how to load rounds into the empty magazines for the various firearms. Everyone was taking it very seriously. Maybe it would turn out to be nothing, but it sure hadn’t sounded like it.
Megan emerged dressed in her camouflage. In addition, she wore one of our old team patches on her shoulder and had slung the crossbow across her back. She had already proven herself with it, and we might need a good, long-range, silent weapon. Her philosophy and mine were much the same; better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.
While Ken hurried into the bedroom to change, Megan and I took the opportunity to help each other stretch our legs and arms for maximum flexibility and blood circulation. It occurred to me that this was the first time since we had gotten here that we had so much as thought about our martial arts training, and I vowed it would become part of our daily routine.
Ken returned wearing cammies. He had helped himself to one of my sheath knives, as well. Everyone was ready, or as ready as we were likely to get. We told the women we would be back before dark and set up recognition signals, so they wouldn’t shoot us if we came back in a hurry.
I turned to Megan. “Just one more thing. This isn’t paintball.”
Her face was set, silent and intense. She tended to get that way when concentrating on something important. I had seen her like that many times before sparring in class or tournaments.
I continued, “There are two big differences. First, the range on these guns is much farther than paintball guns. Always remember that.” She nodded.
“And second-”
“I know,” she interrupted. “If you get hit, you don’t come back in for the next game.”
“You got it.” I pushed back an urge to force her to stay behind. Instead, I turned to Ken. “Ready to go?”
Ken hefted the AR-15. “Waiting on you.”
I took a deep breath to calm my nerves, then slung my machete over my shoulder. “Let’s find out what all the ruckus is about.”
Megan and I quickly taught Ken our hand signals, and we trudged through the brush in silence. For me, the feeling of deja vu was intense. The last time I had gone sneaking through the woods like this had very nearly been fatal. Actually, it had been fatal, to Edgar and Michael.
The shots had come from south of Amber’s spread, past Ken and Cindy’s place. That was all we had to go by, so Ken led us through the brush on barely seen game trails. He whispered that he and some of his neighbors used many of these trails when they were hunting, so a multitude of crisscrossed tracks led to and from most of the homes in the area.
After several minutes, Ken signaled for us to slow down and come forward cautiously. When we moved next to him, he whispered, “This is the back of old man Kindley’s place.”
I pointed out that the house looked vacant.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Do you want to check it out?”
I remembered what Amber had said about all of the deaths and radiation sickness in the area. “Not really…” Visions of grisly, mummified carcasses filled my head. “But I guess we should.”
First, we skirted all around the house making sure no unfriendlies hung about. Then, we quickly ran up to the back door.
“What do we do now?” I asked. “Kick it in?”
Ken turned the knob, and the door swung inward. “The trouble with living in the city is that you can’t trust anyone.” He grinned. “You wouldn’t even dream of leaving your house unlocked, would you?”
I shook my head, and Megan and I followed him in. A quick search of the dark and musty interior revealed it to be mercifully empty. We noted a pantry full of canned goods that we could come back for at a later date, but there were no bodies.
The next house was two miles further, and turned out to be much the same as Kindley’s. As we trekked down the trail, Megan snapped her fingers to get our attention. She pointed to her nose and mimed sniffing the air.
I sniffed and, sure enough, I faintly smelled burning wood. Ken nodded as well. We were getting close to something.
He led more cautiously, stopping frequently to peer intently ahead before leading us into any especially thick brush. As we proceeded, the smell got stronger. And every so often, we could hear the faint sound of voices, several voices.
Finally, Ken signaled for us to stop and wait. The sound of voices had grown steadily stronger until we could nearly distinguish the words of the conversations. It sounded like someone was throwing a party, and we were nearly on top of them. Ken inched his way around a curve in the trail ahead. He returned only a few moments later, jaw clenched in barely controlled fury. “Just around the next bend is John and Pat Robertson’s place,” he whispered. “There’s a group of eight men dressed in camouflage and armed to the teeth having a party on the back porch.”
Obviously, there was more, so I just waited for him to drop the other shoe.
He took a deep breath before he continued, “It looks like they killed John. They just dragged his body out into the backyard and left it.”
Now I thought I understood. Ken felt the need to avenge his friend. But he also knew we couldn’t afford to do anything to attract attention to ourselves unless we had no choice. John Robertson was beyond help, and revealing ourselves this soon wouldn’t change that. But perhaps his wife was still alive.
“Mrs. Robertson?” I asked.
He answered slowly, watching for my reaction. It occurred to me that he seemed more unsure of me than I was of him. “She’s the party. They’re taking turns…” He glanced at Megan. “They’re gang-raping her.”
I knew it wasn’t logical the way my gut twisted at those words. After all, they had murdered a man. But hearing that they were raping the man’s wife put them into an even lower category. They were lower than animals-diseased.
I looked Ken directly in the eyes. “If we do this, we shoot to kill. No one gets away. We can’t risk any of them following us home.”
He didn’t bat an eye. “Suits me fine.”
I turned to Megan. “Do you think you can find your way back?”
“No way,” she slung the crossbow and hefted the Kalashnikov she’d brought. “I’m staying. I don’t have any problems with this.” I recognized the stubborn set to her jaw, the same one her mother displayed when her mind was made up about something. “It’s not like murder, Dad. It’s justice. Besides, what do you think would happen if we didn’t kill them? They would find us on down the road tomorrow or the next day, and they would come after us next. Or maybe they’d find someone else. We have to stop them now.”
She was right, of course, but I was surprised to find that she saw the same implications in the situation that I did. As far as she was concerned, the discussion was over. I couldn’t force her to go back, and she knew it. She would simply follow as soon as I turned my back.
“I know what the stakes are, Dad.”
“All right, then,” I conceded. “Just don’t forget what you learned in paintball. Don’t stay in one place too long. Shoot and move. Don’t get pinned down.”
She nodded, and we planned our attack.
First, watching for any guards, we skirted around the tree line to the right. We found only one. He was poorly hidden in the trees and obviously more intent on watching the abuse of Pat Robertson than doing his job. We got within twenty feet of him, where Megan felt sure of her shot. A single bolt from behind into the base of the skull ensured his silence.
I searched her face for a reaction. I saw her pain at having killed again, but there was also determination.
Ken and I left Megan there, where she would wait for a gunshot from one of us. At that point, the element of surprise would be gone anyway, so we would all simply try to take out as many as possible, as quickly as possible. The tricky part would be doing so without hitting Mrs. Robertson.
Ken led me back to our original location, directly opposite the back porch, and then skirted alone around to the left side of the house. When he got into position, he would signal by beginning the melee, and Megan and I would join in after his first shot.
From where I knelt, I had a clear view of the proceedings in the backyard. One rough-looking man sat in a chair smoking a cigarette, apparently in deep contemplation of the universe. Four more were having a great time as they sat on the tailgate of an old four-wheel-drive pickup passing a bottle of bourbon. I could hear them joking and congratulating themselves on the ease with which they had “wasted that old geezer.”
Pat Robertson was tied to a picnic table where two men with no pants waited their turn behind the one currently violating her. Mercifully, she appeared to be unconscious. I carefully took aim at the head of the man hovering over her. When Ken fired that first shot, the rapist would never hear the second one. I waited for ages.
A quick barrage of machine gun fire came from the trees to my left, and the tailgate party dissolved into blood and screams. Ken had taken all four of them out of the fight before they even knew they were in one.
I had expected a single shot. I had, in fact, forgotten that the AR-15 had been converted, so the burst of half a dozen shots in one second startled me. I reflexively squeezed the trigger just as the scum on Pat Robertson turned his head. A nickel-sized hole appeared where his nose had been, and the back of his skull splattered the far wall.
I fought the bile back down my throat and aimed at the next pantless man, but he fell screaming and clutching his chest as Megan’s rifle echoed from my right. I shifted aim and fired at the next rapist. There were now seven men dead or dying in the yard. The cigarette smoker had been either fast or lucky and had managed to get into the house. If we gave him time to dig in, he’d be able to hold us off forever.
Ken must have realized the same thing because we both rushed toward the back porch as one. “Megan!” I yelled. “Cover us!”
She immediately began firing round after round into the house at random locations. The slugs plowed through the walls and windows, ricocheting around the interior. Ken and I were halfway across the yard when two men came rushing out of the back door and dove for cover behind a large planter. Another smashed out a window to aim at Ken as he quickly backpedaled to the trees. I fired wildly at the window, more to make the guy duck than out of any hope of hitting him. Ken fired a stream of bullets at the planter to keep the other two down, and we retreated back to the cover of the trees.
I cursed myself for not anticipating more of them in the house-another stupid mistake that could have gotten us killed. For that matter, it still could. I heard shouting and return fire around the corner of the house and, as I peeked through the brush, I saw a line of several men run into the trees across the yard. Megan was in trouble.
I grabbed Ken by the shoulder. “Come on!” I hissed, and retreated deeper into the woods so we couldn’t be seen from the house. We ran full throttle toward where we had left Megan. A moment later, the gunfire stopped.
I figured there was no reason for us to be quiet. They knew we were out here, and I didn’t relish the idea of being shot by my own daughter. “Megan! We’re coming in from behind!”
No answer. No gunfire.
A second later, Ken grabbed my shoulder and yanked me down to kneel beside him. “We have to slow down and get off of the trails, or we’re gonna run into an ambush.” It ate at my gut, but he was right.
It slowed us down considerably as we eased ahead silently, scanning every clump of brush thoroughly before we moved close to it. As we neared the area where we had left Megan, I thought I heard whispers, though it was difficult to be certain with my own heartbeat pounding in my ears. I grabbed Ken’s arm to get his attention, pointing first at my ear, then to the woods ahead of us. He nodded, understanding. We eased back slowly to circle around, all the while fear for my daughter gnawing viciously at me.
We snuck around to come at the area from the side. Time seemed to crawl slower than we did, but finally we peered through the brush and saw the backs of four men waiting to ambush us as we barreled down the trail. Four shots later, they joined their buddies in Hell.
We moved back into the brush before the echoes had faded. Almost immediately, we heard shouts from our right.
“Jimmy! Rick! Did you get ’em?”
When Jimmy and Rick didn’t answer, the voices began a worried muttering amongst themselves. We slowly eased around to come in behind their location until Ken abruptly signaled a stop. He gestured me to come even with him and pointed. Up ahead and barely visible through the scrub huddled a group of more than a dozen men… and Megan. A dozen of them! How could we possibly take them all?
They all faced away from us, to where we had left Jimmy and Rick facedown in the trees. One of them held Megan as a shield. Every few seconds, one of them would nervously scan the trees, occasionally peering into the clump that hid Ken and me. We couldn’t get closer without risking exposure, yet we weren’t close enough to get them without endangering Megan. I was in a quandary.
The men finally provided the answer. The one holding Megan pulled out a sheath knife and put the blade to her throat. “All right, you bastards! You get out here where we can see you, or I’ll waste the girl.”
There was my chance to get closer, and seeing the way the man held the knife to Megan’s throat gave me an idea. He had unknowingly put Megan in a situation she had been in hundreds of times. It was a classic self-defense situation in our advanced classes- Knife Defense Technique Number Twelve. I hurriedly whispered to Ken and sketched a hasty drawing in the dirt at our feet. He gave me a quick thumbs up, and I quickly began to back away. Soon, I was far enough out and began to run back in the direction from which we had originally come. I wanted to come in from the trail where they expected us, so as not to give away Ken’s location.
The poor fool holding Megan shouted, “You’ve got ten seconds to show yourselves. Then I’m gonna slit her throat!”
“One!”
He had no idea that from the moment he had put the knife to her throat, he was at her mercy. Even if every other man in that group survived, he didn’t stand a chance. I knew exactly what she would do. I only hoped she would wait a few more seconds.
“Two!”
I leaned the carbine against a tree to the right of the trail.
“Three!”
I pulled out one of the smoke bombs, latched the snap of the pouch through the pull ring, then twisted the pouch around to the right side of my web belt where the dangling incendiary wouldn’t be as noticeable.
“Four!”
I began moving quickly down the trail, making more noise as I moved.
“I hear you out there!” he screamed. “Now come out with your hands over your head, or I swear I’ll kill her, man! Five!”
“Okay, I’m coming out!” I raised my hands and stepped around the last bend in the trail. Instantly, all guns pointed at me. They all peered down the trail behind me waiting for more of us to appear.
“Where’s the rest of you?” the knifeman demanded.
“All around you. They all have their guns pointed at you.” I put on my best poker face, scanning the group. There were fourteen of them. “If anything happens to either me or the girl, you’re all dead men.”
They looked even more nervous, rapidly scanning the trees around them.
“Tell them to drop their guns and come out, now!” he shouted frantically.
“If I did that, you’d kill us. That wouldn’t be very smart on my part.”
“What’s to stop me from killing you now?”
“Think about it, you idiot,” I sneered. “Twenty guns pointed at you, and you have to ask a stupid question like that?”
I looked at Megan. Her right eye puffed shut, and the cheek beneath was swollen, but her attitude remained defiant. She’d had worse from tournaments. “Down and out.” I said in a conversational tone.
She furrowed her brow in puzzlement.
“Twelve, down and out,” I said just as calmly. The position of her feet and hands told me she was already prepared to execute the knife defense. What I was trying to tell her was that she needed to drop down immediately after she had done so. She needed to get down and out.
“What the hell does that mean?” the man asked. Megan’s expression asked the same question.
Well, why not? “It means she needs to drop down and get over here after she executes a number twelve.”
Comprehension dawned on Megan’s face, and she set her weight. All she needed was a distraction. I smiled at the guy. “Don’t worry about it, just hurry up and kill her.”
Now he was really confused. “Wha-?”
It was the last thing he ever said. One of the main things I drilled into my students was that the human brain has about a half-second reaction time. In other words, if the brain was busy doing something else, it took that long to react to new stimulus. As soon as he opened his mouth to speak, Megan knew he was concentrating on something other than her. With the distraction she needed, she shifted her weight and twisted her head, swiftly bringing her left hand to grasp the thumb of his knife hand, pulling it over her left shoulder as her right hand slapped behind his elbow and drove the knife into his own throat.
His throat fountained scarlet, and he instinctively threw himself backward as Megan dove for the ground, but it was too late for him. One of the men closest made a grab at her, but missed. For a heart stopping moment, I saw every gun in the group shift toward us. Then Ken opened up with the machine gun, and I saw five of them die as they turned to face the new threat. The others dropped to the ground as I dove and yanked the smoke bomb off of my belt, leaving the retaining ring dangling from the pouch snap. As smoke began to billow out, I tossed it into the crowd. The smoke washed over them as they shot blindly into the brush from which Ken had fired. Megan and I belly-crawled away as quickly as possible, hidden now by the advertised “fifty thousand cubic feet of thick white smoke.” The minute we hit the trees, we scrambled to our feet and started running.
It would only take a few seconds for them to realize that Ken was no longer shooting at them. The plan had been for him to fire a quick burst, doing as much damage as possible, and then to leave the area before they could get a fix on his location. After that, he would follow my earlier route and meet us back on the trail.
Megan and I tore down the trail and rounded the first curve. I saw the carbine leaning against the tree where I had left it and grabbed it on the run. As we rounded the next curve, I grabbed Megan’s shoulder and pulled her off of the trail to the right, where we ran only a few yards through the brush before kneeling in some scrub to hide and pant for breath.
Handing her the pistol from my holster, I fumbled my belt pouch open to grab another smoke bomb. Then I swung my carbine up to cover the trail. “Ken should be along at any time,” I gasped. “Don’t shoot him.”
She didn’t waste her breath on an answer, just nodded. Sure enough, ten seconds later, Ken came trotting through the trees. He slipped quickly and silently through the trees and, as I watched him, I realized my newfound friend had some hidden facets. If I hadn’t known approximately where to watch, I probably would have missed him altogether. I whistled lightly to get his attention as he crossed the trail, and he veered over to squat next to us.
“Good to see you back with the good guys.” Ken reached out and gingerly touched her swollen cheek. “Looks like they popped you pretty good, though.”
She winced a little at his touch. “It’s all right,” she said. “He won’t pop anyone ever again.”
Ken nodded and turned to me. “Okay, now what?”
“You still think we can get all of them?” I was honestly beginning to doubt it.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But we can’t lead them back home.”
I worried about the same thing. We couldn’t lead them home. We couldn’t take them head on. Our only chance was to ambush them, and finding a way to do that now would be tough. They would be watching for us.
Megan complicated the situation with an observation. “What about Mrs. Robertson? We still have to get her out of there.”
Ken and I glanced at one another. In the heat of the battle, we had both forgotten Pat Robertson, still tied to a table in her backyard. “Let’s get them out here,” I said.
Ken shook his head. “We can’t take them on like this. There are at least eight of them left, and they’re all looking for us right now.”
“All I said was to get them out here.” I grinned. “I didn’t say we were going to wait on them. We fire a few shots to get their attention, get them moving down the trail, then circle back the way we came. Back to the house. You know the trails; they don’t.”
He thought for a moment. “Well, let’s get them out here.”
I smiled wearily. “Is there an echo around here?” I raised the carbine. “Everyone ready?”
When they nodded, I fired four or five shots into the air. Less than a minute later, we heard the sounds of a pack of inept woodsmen crackling through the brush. As soon as I saw movement, I tossed out two more of the smoke bombs and fired. I was out of effective range, but I wanted them to know exactly where we were before we were within range of their weapons. Some of them returned fire; others dove for cover. Within moments, smoke obscured everything. We turned and ran down the trail making enough noise for a blind man to follow. I stopped once to fire back into the smoke, and yelled, “Back to the house! Back to the house! Hurry!” We all turned abruptly to the right, ran about fifty yards, and dropped into the thickest briar patch we could find.
The smoke bombs burned for two more minutes before the cloud slowly began fading. It was difficult to see through the brush of our hiding place but, after a minute or two, we could hear the marauders cautiously moving past. For a second, I entertained the wild idea that it would be the perfect time to impetuously spring to our feet spewing bullets in all directions in a glorious attempt to take out the last of them at a single stroke. Unfortunately, I could tell from the sounds of their passage that they were much too spread out. They were all around us, whispering orders designed to “herd them back to their house.”
We would never be able to get them all. Though the wait was maddening, I sat silently in the briars with Megan and Ken, ignoring the multitude of scratches, bruises, and abrasions our nasty little game of hide and seek produced.
A few minutes later, when we were finally sure that they were past us, we raced back to the Robertson’s home. Ken reached the house first and rushed straight for the back porch.
“Damn! Damn them all!”
I rounded the corner of the house to find Ken kneeling next to the table to which Pat Robertson was tied. As I neared, I could see the bruised and bloody condition she was in. He looked up as Megan and I came toward him. “She’s dead.” Anguish lined his features as he spoke. Pain for the woman and her husband… for his neighbors, his friends. “The filthy animals beat her to death,” he sobbed.
I hesitated a moment, then walked over and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Ken? Ken, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, man. But we have to go.”
He was unresponsive, his grief overwhelming.
“Ken! I understand, but the others are still on that trail. We don’t have time for this.”
“What the hell do you mean, no time?” He slung my hand violently from his shoulder and stood. “Pat’s dead. John’s dead. We didn’t save anyone. All this,” his arm swept out to indicate the bodies littering the area, “was for nothing!” He stepped over to the nearest of the bodies and kicked it. I heard the distinct cracking sound of breaking ribs. He kicked it again and again, caving in an entire side of the corpse. The whole time we could hear him sobbing and saying, “All for nothing!”
The violence of Ken’s reaction startled me. I really didn’t know what to say to get through to him. I was about to try to reason with him when Megan stepped in.
“Where did the rest of them go, Ken?” She asked it quietly, simply, and somehow it got through to him. He stopped the destruction of the corpse and turned to face her, uncertainty on his face.
“Isn’t that trail they’re on the same trail we took from the house?” she prodded. “Where will they end up if they follow it all the way out? Back at the house, right? Back to your wife and my mom and brother.”
The change was immediate. He wiped his eyes. “Okay.” He sniffed, and I could see the difference in his eyes. He was back with us. For now. “Yeah, let’s finish this. How long ago did they pass us on the trail?”
“Nearly five minutes,” I estimated.
“Do you think we can catch them in time?” Megan asked. Five minutes on those trails could translate to more than a mile, and the distance grew as we spoke.
“We can do better than that.” I jerked my thumb at their truck. “If we can find the keys.”
When the interior of the truck failed to yield anything but broken glass, the windshield having been one of the casualties of the fire fight, we had no choice but to search the bodies, something none of us were thrilled about. Feeling sympathy for Megan, I gave her a choice. She could go and retrieve the crossbow and rifle she had lost earlier, along with as many other weapons as she could find lying around, or she could help search the bodies. She took one look at the men in the back of the truck and left to find her weapons.
Meanwhile, Ken and I readied ourselves for the grisly work ahead. “Which one do you want?” he asked.
I noticed that one of the four in the truck bed had a sunburn on his left arm, as if he’d had that arm exposed to the intense sunlight. The right arm was fine. “This one.” I was pretty sure I had found the driver.
Sure enough, his right pants pocket clinked when I patted it. Digging the keys out still proved to be a nasty business, though. The man had evidently been drinking for quite some time before Ken shot him, if the amount of urine staining his pants was any indication. We got the keys, and I started to drag the bodies out of the truck.
“Leave ‘em in the truck.” Ken’s voice was gruff. “I have an idea.”
I gave him a quizzical look but, after his earlier outburst, I wasn’t about to argue. Together, we rolled the bodies further into the bed of the truck and closed the tailgate. Megan returned with several rifles slung over her shoulders and, within minutes, we were flying down the road at eighty miles an hour.
I had never been a conservative driver, but the way Ken slid and whipped around blind turns scared the hell out of me. “Think we’ll make it?” I shouted to be heard above the combined roars of the engine and the wind screaming through the broken windshield.
Ken nodded. “No problem!”
“Think we’ll make it in one piece?”
He grinned maliciously and eased the speed all the way down to seventy-five. “Better?”
Before I could reply, he slowed abruptly and swerved right at a mailbox marked “Kindley.” The sudden turn slammed Megan into me and me into Ken. I was just getting ready to shout a commentary on his driving skills when he slammed on the brake, throwing us into the dash. The entire trip had lasted less than four minutes.
“End of the line, folks. Megan hurry and open the garage door. We don’t want them to recognize the truck.”
She jumped out and hastened to comply. I scrambled out after her and ran to the front door, which was of course, unlocked. As Ken pulled the truck into the garage, I rushed to the fireplace and opened the flue. Our hastily constructed plan called for us to attract the attention of the approaching bandits. As far as they knew, we were just ahead of them. Hopefully, they still thought they were driving us back to our home. We needed them to think this was it.
We started a fire and pulled the four bodies out of the back of the truck, dragging them inside through the garage door. We propped them up at various windows behind their own rifles. By the time we finished, from the outside of the house, it looked as if someone was standing guard, waiting for trouble.
“This is what you wanted them for?”
“Yeah.”
I shuddered. “What exactly did you do in the Marines?”
“Whatever needed to be done.” He turned away without further comment.
Ken and I took positions in the brush around the house. Megan climbed a massive oak and hid in its huge branches above a small fork in the trail. From there, she would have a perfect sniper’s view of the two possible routes to the house. I ducked into some bushes on the side of the trail nearest the edge of the clearing. Ken handed me one end of a roll of kite string he had found in the Kindley’s house and ran further down the trail unwinding it behind him.
We would wait until the bandits were busy watching the house, then Megan would start things rolling with some strategically placed shots. Ken and I had opted to depend upon our knives and surprise rather than firearms since our positioning would put us in each other’s line of fire.
So we waited. And waited. It reminded me of the night of the bombs. Each time I checked my watch, I expected to find that ten minutes had slipped by. Instead, only two had passed. My imagination kicked into overdrive. They must have slipped around us. Maybe they realized that we’d circled back to the Robertson’s, and they had turned back after us. I knew a thousand things could have gone wrong, and I convinced myself that at least one of them had.
Then I heard them. Five miles of hiking through the woods had obviously not improved their stalking skills at all. If anything, they sounded louder than ever. Many of them dragged their feet through the leaves and pine needles, stumbling over roots and branches as they walked, while others whispered complaints to their companions. A group of four of them came within five yards of where I squatted in the bushes between two trees. They peered out of the trees at the Kindley house, saying something about smoke, but I couldn’t tell if they were worried about my smoke bombs, or if they were talking about the smoke from the fireplace. I didn’t care, as long as they kept their attention focused on the house.
Trying not to move any more than absolutely necessary, I quietly scanned the area for the others. I knew there were still at least four more in the band, but where were they? A hint of movement to my right revealed that two more had just passed beneath Megan’s hiding place.
That left two. I looked back down the trail and saw them trudging along, completely ignorant of the slight movement in the pile of pine needles between two trees. A moment after they passed it, I tugged on the kite string and the needles rose and dispersed, leaving Ken’s dark form in their place as he stood and began to sneak up behind the pair, a knife in each hand, eyes hard. From my vantage, I could see their deaths in Ken’s eyes and felt a moment of compassion. Then I remembered Pat Robinson. I turned to my group, machete in my right hand, Bowie in my left.
Careful to keep a tree between myself and Ken’s quarry, I stood slowly, catching Megan’s eye. I nodded, and she rose to her knees in the crook of those two enormous branches, raised the Kalashnikov, sighted in on the two below her, and opened fire.
As soon as she did, the four in front of me spun to face her. I waded in from behind with the machete, and things moved in a blur from there. I decapitated the first of them before the others even knew I was on them. At almost the same time, I drove the Bowie knife high into the back of another and felt it lodge in his spine. With no time to work it loose, I left it, spinning to confront the other two. Both of them tried to bring their rifles to bear, but the quarters were too close. I slashed one across his left shoulder as he turned, then reversed direction and jabbed the point upward through his throat. He died instantly, wrenching the machete from my grip as he fell.
The last man succeeded in getting his barrel up, but I was practically on top of him. I slid right, parried the rifle barrel, and slipped up alongside him. A head butt and a hard uppercut broke his nose and cracked ribs, loosening his grip on the rifle. I yanked it out of his grasp and slammed the butt into his diaphragm as hard as I could. He went to his knees with a wheezing exhalation, gagging until I silenced him with the rifle stock on the base of his skull.
I whirled to see how Ken was doing just in time to see the last of his two drop to the ground, bleeding profusely from the neck. Looking back toward the oak tree, I saw Megan jumping down from the lowest branch.
It was over.
Less than ten seconds had passed since Megan’s first shot. Megan’s two were unequivocally dead, as were both of Ken’s. Of my group, two were dead, and one was dying with a knife in his back. The last one was unconscious with a bloody nose, broken ribs, and a nasty bump on the back of his skull.
With no minor trepidation, I yanked the knife from the spine of the dying freebooter, knowing as I did so that it would likely kill him. It did, leaving us with a lone survivor and an ethical question that none of us wanted to deal with.
Should we kill him, finishing what we had started, or rather, what they had started? Or should we let him live? To be, or not to be? This perverted version of Hamlet’s dilemma now faced us squarely in the guise of this helpless young man.
“Kill him,” Ken said bluntly. He looked at me with the pained expression of a person caught between two equally distasteful choices. “You’re the one who said we would have to kill them all.”
He pointed to the unconscious form on the ground. “Kill him, and it’s over.”
He was right but, still, I hesitated, my emotions clashing with my logic. “How will you feel about it when we do kill him?”
I intentionally used the plural pronoun so that he couldn’t distance himself from the event. “He’s beaten and helpless. Hell, Ken, he may die anyway! But do you really want to live with the idea that we killed him in cold blood?”
“Don’t try that judge, jury, and executioner philosophical crap on me! This guy is a murderer and a rapist! He and his buddies killed John and Pat. How many others have they killed? For that matter, how many more would they have killed if we hadn’t gotten them today?”
“I don’t know.” I shook my head wearily. I was exhausted, tired of the whole situation, both mentally and physically. Still shaking my head, I handed Ken the crimson coated knife that I had just pulled from the other man. “If you’re that determined, if you are that sure you’re right, then go ahead. Because I honestly don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong at this point. All I know is, I don’t want anything to do with it.” I took the coward’s way out and headed for the house.
Megan followed behind me, and we left Ken staring at the bloody knife in his hand.
A couple of minutes after Megan and I walked into the house, I heard the back door slam behind us. Turning, I saw Ken standing in the kitchen with the would-be bandit slung over his shoulders. “We need to get him to the hospital.”