Trail of Misery

by N A Broadley

  He gazed up at the moon, fat and bright. It was high in the night sky, and he guessed it was close to midnight. He would take a short nap, two hours at the most and then start again. He didn’t want to rest. He wanted to push on. But he knew his body wouldn’t hold up to the punishment of pushing himself through the darkness. Scratches dotted his arms and face from fighting through the dense brush and low hanging branches on the trail, His muscles twitched and jumped with exhaustion.

  He didn’t know where this Bobby person was from, but he’d guessed it probably wasn’t far from the trail. He didn’t know the men he’d talked about gathering together or how many there would be. What he did know was that if he didn’t warn the man and the two women and Bobby found them before he did, then they’d probably be dead within a few days.

  At first light, he set out again. The sun rose above the mountains, and soon he felt the first traces of sweat tickling as it ran down his back. Their trail was easy to follow. Broken twigs as one or the other brushed by a bush on the side of the trail, moss that crushed underfoot, things that an untrained eye might not see, but he did. His years of tracking animals trained his eyes to look for what others would not notice.

  He’d come across several places where they camped and knew he wasn’t long behind them — a half day at the most. Shaking his head, he grimaced. If he found it this easy to track them, then Bobby and his men would find it easy as well.

  Through the long night, he’d thought about how he could help them. He would need to get them off the trail and up into the woods. They would be harder to track that way. He could bring them back to town through a series of side trails and back roads. But what then? The town was no safer for them then the trail they were on.

  He thought of Roger, his grandfather. He could take them there. This thought punched him hard in the gut. The last time he’d seen Roger they’d had words. Words he now regretted.

  Roger, his grandfather, built a small compound. He saw the writing on the wall, so to speak and prepared for it. And he begged Spike to move his family there when things started to go bad. But, Spike believed differently. He believed that things would smooth out, that the government would step in and help them all. That the situation wouldn’t last that long. How wrong he’d been. How stupidly arrogant. And his family paid the price for his stubbornness, for his stupidity.

  With a self-loathing so deep it almost made him physically sick, he pushed harder. He hadn’t been able to save his family, but he might be able to save the man and the two women.

  He smelled the wood smoke from their campfire just as the sky was turning from dusk to dark. He purposely made lots of noise as he got closer to their camp. He didn’t want them panicking and shooting him. He froze in his tracks as a large dog came charging toward him.

  “Jessie!” a female voice spoke sharply. A male voice floated out of the darkness behind him, and he turned quickly, looking into the coldest eyes he’d ever seen.

  “One move and I’ll be seeing your brains on the ground,” the male voice growled. Spike rose his arms slowly above his head.

  “I’m a friendly mister,” he said softly.

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” the man said as Spike felt him nudge the gun barrel into his belly.

  “Turn around and walk slowly toward the camp. Remember, one wrong move, and I will shoot you.”

  Spike did as he was told and had no doubt this man would follow through on his threat.

  The man, once he led Spike into camp, began searching him for weapons and Spike didn’t resist. He would have done the same thing himself if the situation was reversed.

  As he stood silent and still, his eyes met an older woman’s. Although she tried to put on a brave face, he could tell she was terrified. Behind her stood a younger girl, if he had to guess, he’d say she was barely sixteen. Both looked travel weary. The older woman showed dark bruises on her face and eyes, purple that had taken on a shade of sickly yellow. She’d been beaten. Spike wondered if it was the dead men back yonder that did it. The younger girl was scrawny, hungry looking. But nowadays, most people he saw looked the same, malnourished and near starvation.

  Mother and daughter? He didn’t know why, but he didn’t think they were related. It was just a feeling in his gut. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the man yet, but from within the light of the shadows, he guessed him to be at least six foot tall with a wiry build: broad shoulders and thick arms.

  “Okay, sit down,” the man said as he pushed him roughly toward a log near the fire. Spike sat as the man told him to. The man sat across the fire, facing him with his gun resting on his knees aimed right toward him. His finger, Spike noticed, lay alongside the trigger. In a safe position but one that would give him split-second access if he needed to pull it.

  “So you must be Bobby, man I don’t know, but dang, I somehow thought you’d be, say, bigger?” the man said then laughed softly. Spike smiled in return, then couldn’t help but burst out laughing.

  “So you know about Bobby?” he snickered between gusts of laughter. “Sorry dude, no, I am not Bobby. I’m the man that’s gonna save your asses from Bobby though.”

  ∞

  Sarah watched from across the fire. She could see, no she could feel that the man who sat across from her was a good man. His body language, his voice, even his eyes spoke of kindness. Dark hair, a dimple on the left side of his mouth when he laughed, green eyes, yes, she thought him quite handsome. Getting up, she walked around the fire pit and sat down beside him, ignoring Beth’s hard stare. She blushed when he turned his head toward her and smiled. It was an impish smile, one that could only come from someone with a sense of humor.

  She always had a gift of reading people. And most times she was right in her assessment of them. Like Beth. She’d read Beth as being kind and gentle. Naïve actually and that’s why she chose to stay with her. That is why she felt that Beth needed her. And Brian, she read him as tough, hard when he needed to be, but loyal and fierce with those he cared about. And she knew he cared for her and Beth.

  This man. He carried a lot of pain; she saw it in the shadow that lay just behind his eyes. But he meant them no harm. Satisfied with her assessment, she sat with her hands folded in her lap and listened to the conversation unfold.

  Chapter Twenty

  Roger Boyslin shook his head and groaned in frustration. At sixty-six years old he felt he’d seen way too much of life. First Viet Nam, now this. Reaching over, he grabbed Cain’s shoulder and squeezed tight.

  “Don’t worry boy. We’ll go get him,” The (him) he was talking about was his grandson, Spike. The damn fool had taken off on his own to track down the men who murdered his wife and children, Roger’s great-grandchildren.

  When Spike came to him just after it happened, his frame of mind was almost maniacal, psychotic. He talked of the butchery through choking tears and sobs. He talked of hunting down the men and skinning them alive for what they did to his family. Roger tried to talk him out of his crazy plan and thought he had only to find out; the man decided to go it alone anyway. What Spike failed to hear was that those three men were part of a larger gang from a few towns over. That this gang was heavily armed and dangerous. That he, Spike, would not have a prayer in hell of winning if he took them on alone.

  Roger begged him to wait. To give him the time to gather up his men, plan and approach this with a level head. But Spike refused to listen. In his grief, his heart was hell-bent on revenge.

  Roger knew about the gang for quite some time now. They made raids in town several times, always leaving behind a trail of bodies whenever they showed their faces.

  “Why didn’t he just wait for us!” Cain grumbled. Roger shook his head. He knew why Spike hadn’t waited. It was the same reason he’d refused to move his family to the protective shelter of the compound: stubbornness, pride, and downright hard headedness. His grandson, although he loved him dearly, could be a pisser when he chose to.

  “Gather up the men. Tell them we need to mo
ve in five minutes,” Roger said as he pulled on a pair of old, beat up work boots. Pain ripped through his shoulder as he bent to tie the laces. Bursitis. Old man’s ailment and it sucked to be getting old.

  He hadn’t wanted to take the fight to the enemy, but Spike’s move left him no choice. He planned to lie in wait, to plan and execute a defensive strategy.

  He knew they would have a better chance at success if fought on their own turf. He didn’t know how large the gang out of Massachusetts was. He’d heard rumors of thirty men up to one hundred. He’d been gathering intel slowly over the past few weeks from his network but still didn’t have a good handle on the size of the gang’s numbers.

  What he did know was this, these men, this gang that Spike was aiming for was part of a much larger group that called themselves the Tristate Alliance. His connections out of the south were tracking these criminals and what they were relaying back scared the living shit out of Roger.

  From what he learned, this group was the culmination of three other gangs which grew their numbers to a staggering amount. Where ever they went, they left destruction and death in their wake. What he didn’t get was an accurate count on the force they’d become. And this bothered him. In Nam he’d gone into enough fights to know, you never underestimate the numbers of your opponents. That mistake could cost you the battle and many lives.

  He’d seen the writing on the wall years before the virus spread like a prairie fire through the United States. He knew something would befall his great nation. He just hadn’t known what that something was. He’d prepared though. Stockpiling food, fuel, medicine, ammunition, and whatever else he thought would get them through. He’d created underground caches and root cellars, he’d dug several wells on his property, raised herds of goats and cows, pigs, horses, and mules. He’d raised flocks of chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese.

  Mary Anne, his wife, spent hours each day in the kitchen, canning, drying, preserving. Then he began building out-buildings under the guise of animal housing so the town wouldn’t catch wind of his prepping activities. These outbuilding though were for human inhabitants. Little tiny homes equipped with gravity fed water from the well, solar panels for energy, woodstoves for cooking and heat.

  It took him many years to build his compound. And less than two months to fill it with carefully selected people. He hadn’t done this all on his own though. Others believed the same as he did. And those others were the foundation of the militia. And they were a skilled group.

  At his compound, there were seventy fighting men and their families at last count. And every day they were training up new fighters to strengthen their position. Several compounds they’d connected with boasted numbers far larger. They had a communications system that reached as far north as Canada and as far west as California.

  They were the Truth Seekers, and as a group, they kept constant information flowing. And thus far they had been able to hold their own against the onslaught of trouble that frequented their doorsteps.

  He remembered when their little group of fifteen started. It was years of planning and preparations, communicating theories that hadn’t come to fruition and watching the ever failing government policies. They now kept in contact through HAM radio. The information they all shared was crucial to each of their success.

  The original fifteen of them once were part of a much larger group but broke off and formed their own after internal strife, bickering, and power struggles. Accusations of fear-mongering and spreading conspiracy theories finally drove them out to form their own group. And now they had compounds throughout the United States.

  In the North East, there was Naomi Silter, who established her compound in New Hampshire. In Kentucky, there was Alan Moses’s compound that at last count was three hundred strong. Then in Wisconsin, there was Joe Nagler. He’d been the founder of their core group.

  Then there was Joyce Mclista, a spunky ball of fire from Alabama who had a compound that ran like a well-oiled machine and she kept them apprised of the activity going on in her neck of the woods. Kelly Durham ran her compound out of Ontario, Canada and she was their ears to the North, keeping them all apprised of the refugee and border activity.

  Seth Pinley was located in Central Kentucky. He and Alan worked closely with each other, being the largest of all the compounds. They formed several offshoot compounds throughout their state, taking in refugees from all over the nation, training them and working on trade specialty classes that brought up a well-educated network of skilled carpenters, blacksmiths, welders and various other trade skills long forgotten by the current society.

  In California, the first state to be hit with the virus, there was Claude Underwood. He had the toughest go of all. As a highly skilled Registered Nurse, retired military, and well educated Crisis Responder, he had to keep most of his prepping activities from those around him.

  California had been spiraling down long before the event. Too much corruption, too many that couldn’t conceive of the shit show that was coming and too many laws that would restrict the people from doing what he was doing, prepping for the end of the world. The struggle for Claude to create and build the compound in his part of the nation was fraught with one disaster after another.

  The Gun ban made him a criminal, then the cost of living so high that investing the money nearly broke him. But, with the help of the group, he persevered and got it up and running successfully.

  Taylor Eddie, hailed from Florida and his compound ran alongside another set of patriots called the Gator Swamp Militia. After several rough and bumpy encounters, power struggles, and skirmishes, the two groups pulled together on common ground and settled into combining their resources to form the Coastal Patriots, a diverse and highly skilled and scattered network that ran the full length of the Eastern Coast.

  Lastly, Kelsey Salmiver, who was from Arizona and Lori Franks from Tennessee. Both women brought the skill of communications to the entire group. They became the bones of HAM radio communication network. In the early days of planning, they shipped equipment, instructed and educated on the what’s, where’s and how’s of the HAM radio world.

  They were the planners. Mapping out escape routes for each member should they have to bug out, setting up safe houses, creating drop locations for supplies and other needed items.

  Because although all of them planned on staying at their compounds, they knew, should they be overrun with the unfriendly persuasion, bugging out might be their only and last option.

  Jenny Sigmond hailed from the great state of Texas, and she was key in keeping them all apprised of the border activities, the military movements and the reformation of territories that were constantly shifting and changing hands with each new player in the game.

  Lisa Belmore and Kay Thibalt were part of her offshoot group, each creating mirroring compounds in their areas and thus, building a massive defense system that could be implemented within a moment’s notice should they need to move quickly from one compound to another.

  Then came was Earl Vorhees, out of Mississippi. His compound was only a hundred or so strong, but it was growing fast, and he was active in planting the seeds of smaller, interconnected groups of patriots in neighboring states.

  Kris Gallerger built his compound in the cold climate of Minnesota. Spread out on one hundred and fifty acres with roughly seventy-five or so fighting men; Kris had one advantage that most of the others did not, his compound was surrounded with highly trained ex-military. His group fought weekly sometimes daily skirmishes with gangs that came in hordes from the nearby cities.

  To say they’d all been busy the past few years would be an understatement. Roger thought of this and grimaced. They all saw the future and it scared them shitless.

  They were sitting better than most. Reports through the network brought them news of cities, towns and little one-stoplight burgs decimated by looting and burning. Nightmarish stories of cannibalism and violence that could even make the most hardened of men weep in despair. They were wagi
ng war, one against the very own people of the country who wanted nothing more than to see it fall.

  The biggest fight for him was the onset of Martial law. When the suits came and tried to pilfer supplies from his compound for the FEMA camps they opened. He’d been prepared for that as well. They brought plenty of firepower with them; the fight was bloody and swift. He’d lost several good men, but they lost more. Then shortly after, the camps petered out, and the suits disappeared along with their soldiers.

  Martial law turned into no law other than the law of survival. It was then that the gangs began to spring up in the surrounding areas. Each gang leader was trying to establish their turf. Skirmishes fought, lives were lost, kingpins rose above the cesspool like scum on a pond — survival of the fittest, of the meanest in a jungle of Screwed Seven Way’s to Sunday.

  The winter was hard on his compound. They lost a few, some to illnesses, some from accidents, and violence. But they made it. They worked to help the townspeople the best they could, taking many into the compound while others, such as his grandson, adamantly insisted on going it alone.

  This presented another problem for him and his men. Those who lived outside the compound were defenseless. So, nightly patrols were sent out to try and keep the area safe. But this spread his men thin. Exhaustion set in and mistakes were made, so he pulled back on assisting, realizing he had to take care of his own first and foremost.

  If trouble arrived and he knew about it, he would send out a small contingency to help put it down. But often by the time he heard about it, the damage was already done, and they were too late. Spikes situation was a prime example of arriving too late to help.

  Pulling on his rain jacket, Roger sighed deeply and opened the door. It was time to find his grandson and shed some blood.