Before he could act any further, she knew she had to at least try and do something to stop him. “I’ll… I’ll scream.”
His hand left her vagina and returned a second later, beneath her belly. The cold steel of his combat knife pressed against the curve, just beneath her navel. “You make one little peep, gal, and that baby is gonna spill out and float down the creek. Then I’ll leave you here bleeding from one nasty C-section and go up the hill there and kill every last one of those people, including your dip-shit husband and your daughter.”
Enolia swallowed dryly and grew still… and waited for her violation.
Then she heard a man’s voice behind her assailant and her grimace of degradation changed into a grin of satisfaction.
“Let go of her,” Billy said coldly.
You’re dead, you son of a bitch, she thought. He’s going to make you pay for what you did back at that grocery store… and what you’re trying to do right now.
But, surprisingly enough, that wasn’t what happened at all. Instead, Enolia lifted her face and turned to see her husband with his back planted firmly against the trunk of a birch tree. Gentry’s thick forearm was against his chest and the point of his knife was angled beneath Billy’s chin.
Dazed, Enolia turned and sat on the rock, naked, looking up at what was taking place. Her pretty face flushed with indignation. Her eyes locked with her husband’s. What are you waiting for? she demanded wordlessly. Do something!
Instead, the Cherokee spoke softly. “We won’t allow your behavior any longer, Gentry.”
Frank laughed. “We? Who the hell is we? Those hillbillies? That dumb, blue-gum nigger up there, sniffing around that skinny red-headed gal? You?” The soldier spat to the side and grinned viciously. “Nobody’s doing nothing. Nothing but taking orders from me. Starting tomorrow, all of you jump when I say jump and shit when I say shit. If you don’t, I’ll consider you traitors and do you like I did those ungrateful grunts that followed me from Bragg. You’ll either be dinner for the Biters or those little black bugs… it’s your choice.”
Enolia watched as Billy stared emotionlessly over Benson’s shoulder at her. End this now! her eyes implored. Please!
What might have happened then never did. Instead, someone called out from the top of the wooded hollow. “Hey… what’s going on down there?”
Frank pulled the blade away from Billy’s throat and stepped away from the tree, releasing him. “Listen up… both of you. One word of what happened down here and you’re going to wake up one morning to find that little girl of yours gone. You’ll look and look, but you’ll never find her. Not all of her. Understand?”
Enolia nodded.
The soldier turned back to Billy. “How about you, little chief?”
The Cherokee’s eyes narrowed. “Yes.”
“Is everything alright?” called Levi again. They could see the man and his two sons at the top of the ridge, although they could not see them clearly through the foliage of the trees.
Frank tucked himself in and zipped his pants. He returned his knife to its sheath, then strolled past the birch and started up the hill. “No problem down here. I was just having a friendly pow-wow with the Tauchee family, that’s all.”
A moment later, when Frank had returned to camp, Enolia hurriedly pulled on her clothes. She glared at Billy, who still stood beneath the tree. “That bastard nearly got you killed this morning. Then he comes down here and tries to… to… rape me… and you just stand there?”
Her husband shook his head. “Not right now. Not in front of Levi and the others. You know that I can’t. I have my—”
“Yes, I know. You have your orders! Well, the people you made that commitment to are all dead and gone now. It’s time to move on. You shouldn’t have stepped back when Levi and the others went to that boy’s house back in Hendersonville. If you’d gone with them, maybe Agnes and her sister would still be alive.”
Billy’s expression darkened. “Don’t you think I know that?”
Enolia immediately regretted what she had said. The anger in her eyes softened. “Baby, I’m scared. He’s a mean and vindictive man. If we don’t do exactly what he wants, he’ll end up killing us all. And he’s sneaky. I didn’t even hear him come up on me, even with all these dead leaves around. He’s nearly as good as you are.”
Her husband grinned. It wasn’t a gesture that included his eyes. “Oh, you really think so?”
“Please… just take care of it. Before we find ourselves in a situation that we can’t get out of.”
“I will,” he promised. “Later.” He nodded toward the camp at the crest of the backwoods hollow. “But not in front of them.”
It was nearly eleven-thirty. Everyone in the camp was asleep, except for two.
Billy Tauchee sat on one side of the fire, his wife and daughter nestled in sleeping bags behind him. Frank Gentry sat across from him, finishing off his second six-pack of the night. The soldier sat against the base of a tree, half drunk, staring at the Cherokee, trying to figure out what he was up to. Billy had cut a maple branch into eight six-inch lengths and was shaving the ends into sharp points.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked.
“Whittling,” Billy told him. “It’s my hobby.”
The soldier nodded toward the sticks. “What are they?”
Billy smiled. “My daughter wants a tent for her doll. These are the stakes.”
Gentry’s eyes centered on the folding knife with the black handle. “Where did you get that?”
“It was a gift. From my Uncle Sam.”
Frank smiled contemptuously. “Maybe I’ll slit your throat with it after I take it away from you. You do know I’m gonna kill you, don’t you?”
Billy said nothing. He simply kept his eyes on his work and continued to whittle.
“Yeah, it’s gonna happen… sooner or later. Something about you gets under my skin like a burr.” The soldier shivered and pulled on a camo field jacket. “It’s chilly out tonight. I think I’ll turn in. You take first watch and wake me up at two for mine. And you better keep your damn eyes sharp. If you let a Biter or two get within a hundred feet of this camp, I’ll take your stupid pegs and shove them cross-ways up your ass. You understand me, Geronimo?”
Billy nodded, but refused to lift his eyes. “Loud and clear.”
Frank lay flat on his back on the ground. “You know something? I usually have one big-ass hard-on when I wake up. It’d be a damn shame to waste it. I may just slam it to your whore of a wife… or that red-haired gal or her mama.”
The Cherokee said nothing… just continued whittling.
Soon, the soldier was asleep and snoring heavily, oblivious to all that went on around him.
And Billy grinned and whittled. Whittled and grinned.
Frank Gentry awoke in the middle of the night with a suffocating sensation of weight bearing down on the center of his chest. His eyes opened to find Billy Tauchee sitting there, staring down at him.
“What the shit?” he blurted. Frank tried to sit up, but found that he couldn’t. He twisted his head from side to side and saw that he had been secured to the ground with the six-inch pegs. They had been pushed through the edges of his jacket and trousers, anchoring him to where he lay.
“Shhhhh,” Billy whispered, pressing the blade of the folding knife against Gentry’s lips. “Let’s not wake the others. Time for a little powwow, as you call it. Just you and me.”
Frank stared up at him, but said nothing.
“You know what?” Billy said. “I don’t believe you are Special Forces. I don’t think you’re even regular Army. I think you’re some dumb-ass redneck weekend-warrior who looted an armory and gave himself a promotion. You have a few skills and know enough technique and jargon to fool a layman, but you can’t fool me.” A thin grin crossed Billy’s face like a nightcrawler slithering across clay earth. “Tell me something. Have you ever heard of Black Arrow?”
Frank stiffened beneath him.
“Yeah, I thought so. An elite unit of Native Americans. Cherokee, Apache, Seminole, Blackfoot, Comanche… trained in stealth and shadow… extraction, reconnaissance, search and destroy, assassination. We did it all. Three tours in Iraq, four in Afghanistan… and other places, too.”
Frank suddenly found his voice. “Let… let me up.”
“Not just yet.” Billy turned the blade of his knife in the firelight. “Not so high and mighty now, are you? I think the reason you’re so damn mean is because you look mean. Maybe we can do something about that. Those eyebrows, for example. They make you look so damn intimidating.” He brought the edge of the blade down and cleanly shaved the blond hairs over Frank’s right eye away. “There. Much better. As smooth as a baby’s ass.”
Gentry didn’t move a muscle. He laid perfectly still, his face as pale as a bed sheet.
“Okay… now the other one.” Billy laid the curved blade against the soldier’s skin and began to shave away his left eyebrow. Halfway there, the razor edge hit a bump, nicking the skin. “Oops. Didn’t mean to cut you. Why, look at that. Your blood is red… just like me.”
Frank’s eyes rolled wildly from side to side, searching for help, but finding none. He looked as though he was on the point of passing out.
Billy continued to work with the knife until the other eyebrow was gone. “Ah, not so judgmental now. Face so soft and pretty… like a woman’s.” The Cherokee’s face grew sinister in the dancing glow of the fire. “Speaking of women, if you ever touch my wife again, I’ll do a number with this knife and make you eat your pride. I believe you know what I mean by that… don’t you?”
Frank nodded almost imperceptively, afraid that sudden motion might cause him to lose more than his eyebrows.
Slowly, Billy rose, departing from his place on Frank’s chest. He spotted a single drop of blood on the knife’s blade and wiped it on the material of the big man’s jacket.
“Let me up,” croaked Gentry, his voice quavering. “Please.”
“Yes, I’ll let you up,” Billy agreed. “But one wrong move on your part and I’ll slit you open from breastbone to groin. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
Billy crouched and yanked the pegs from the man’s clothing. “Stand up with your back facing me,” he instructed.
Shakily, Frank did as he said. Billy reached around him and shucked the Heckler & Koch .45 from its holster. “I’ll take this.” He rummaged through the storage pockets of Benson’s flak vest until he found the keys to the Humvee. “And these.”
Frank stood there for a long moment. “Now what?”
“Now we go our separate ways. We head north and you head south… as far south as your feet can carry you. And that will be the last we ever see of one another.”
“You’re… you’re sending me out there? Without a gun?”
“You can keep that big-ass Rambo knife of yours,” Billy told him. “If you’re as good as you make out, you should be able to fend off the Biters with it. Unless you come upon five or six of them, that is. Then my advice would be to toss it in the bushes and run like hell.”
Frank Gentry stood there for a moment, hesitant.
Billy put his boot in the small of the soldier’s back, sending him stumbling forward. “Go.”
The man started forward, toward the darkness beyond the reach of the campfire light. He stopped one more time.
“Walk,” the Cherokee told him softly. “And if you get halfway through those woods and feel like you need to come back, don’t. I’ll be watching and I’ll put a .30-06 slug between your seventh and eighth vertebrae and leave you crippled for the zombies to gnaw on. It doesn’t bother me to shoot a man in the back. I’ve done it before.”
As the man moved forward and stepped out of the perimeter of the camp, Bill Tauchee closed the blade of his knife and returned it to the pouch on his belt. Then he retrieved his rifle from where it leaned against a tree nearby. He stood for a long time, eye to the scope, watching as the pale form of Frank Gentry slowly disappeared from sight. Then he breathed easy and sat beside the fire, to take the second watch of the night.
The following morning, Levi Hobbs awoke to find Billy crouched beside the fire, heating a pot of coffee over the crackling flames.
The Tennessean stood up and stretched. Then he looked over at the base of the tree where the soldier had made his billet the night before. “Where’s Gentry?” he asked.
“Gone,” the Cherokee simply said.
“Gone? What do you mean gone?”
“He said he was sick and tired of hanging around us losers and he took off into the woods.”
Levi looked over at the tree and saw Gentry’s Armalite and SG516 propped against the trunk. Then he looked toward the highway and saw the Humvee where Frank had parked it the evening before. “Just up and walked off? Without his guns or his vehicle?”
“Yeah,” said Billy, pouring Levi a cup of coffee. “Strange, isn’t it?” He took a set of keys from the pocket of his denim jacket. “Looks like I’ve got a new ride. Not as comfy as the BMW, but it does have more firepower.”
Levi took the brew and downed a couple of swallows. “You know something, Billy?” he said, after a moment.
“What’s that?”
“I’m a light sleeper. Doesn’t take very much at all to wake me up.”
“Oh, is that so?”
“Yeah.” A little smile crossed Levi’s bearded face. “And sometimes I have the craziest dreams. Matter of fact, I had me one last night.” He looked down and, seeing a wooden peg, kicked it across the clearing. It bounced once, before ending up in the fire.
“Oh, yeah?” Billy didn’t look up as he poured a cup for himself. “And what was this dream about?”
“That’s the funny thing about my dreams,” Levi told him. “Once I wake up, I can’t, for the life of me, remember what they were about.”
The Cherokee nodded, smiling. “Fair enough.”
The two drank their coffee and enjoyed the solitude of the wooded clearing for a while, saying nothing, but understanding each other completely.
“We’ll have a bite of breakfast, then head on to Asheville,” Levi suggested. “Tyrone’s parents live about twenty-five miles away. We’ll go there first, then head onward.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Billy agreed.
The two had another cup of coffee in the gray dawn of a new day before waking the others.
Chapter 23
“This ain’t right,” Tyrone said grimly.
He stared through the passenger side window of the Yukon at the front yard of the little farm he had once called home. There were several vehicles parked in the gravel driveway and in the withered grass in front of the two-story house. One belonged to a neighbor, Luke Tatum, who lived down the road a piece—a Ford pickup with more rust than red paint and a pump shotgun still cradled in a rack in the back window of the cab. The other two were Buncombe County police cars. All sat silently with their doors open, seemingly abandoned. From the road, he could see the body of a deputy sheriff, lying face down on the front porch.
Tyrone climbed out of the SUV and stood there for a long moment, hesitant. Kate left the vehicle and joined him. “It’s awful quiet. I don’t think anyone’s here.”
“Oh, she’s here, alright,” he said. “I can feel her nearby. I always could.”
Levi and his boys stood beside their truck, guns in hand. “Want us to come along?”
“No. I’ll go alone.”
“Best hurry it up,” said Avery. He nodded toward the west. A swirling cloud of buzzards swooped and darted in the autumn sky. “The Zone’s coming upon us… and it looks like a bunch of them.”
“I’ll make it quick.” Tyrone stepped off the blacktop of the rural road and into the yard. He walked carefully, as though navigating a mine field.
Kate glanced into the Yukon and saw the Thompson propped against the passenger seat, its barrel angled toward the floorboard. “Aren’t you taking your gun?”
Tyrone turned and frowned at her. “That’s my mama in there.”
“But there could be Biters in there,” she told him. “Or your mother… she could have…”
“Turned?” Tyrone’s expression darkened. “If she has, I’ll handle it.”
Kate stepped forward. She laid a freckled hand gently in the crook of his arm. “I’m going with you.”
The big man paused and then nodded. “Okay. But keep those pistols in your pockets, will you?”
She said nothing, made no promises. Together, they started toward the house.
It had taken them longer to reach the Jackson farmstead than they had first expected. A fourth of the way there, a burnt-out tanker truck and a dozen blackened vehicles blocked the highway, causing them to double-back several miles to find an alternate route. Instead of arriving around ten o’clock in the morning, they had finally reached the farm at a quarter ’til four in the afternoon. Long evening shadows were already forming and the sun was sinking toward the tree line to the west. Soon, gloom would darken the countryside and a chilly autumn night would descend upon them.
Tyrone and Kate were nearly to the rear bumper of the first patrol car, when a sound caught their attention. A thumping noise echoed from inside a small, weathered outbuilding. The door was closed and a length of heavy chain had been wrapped several times around the shed and secured with a large Yale padlock.
“Something’s in there,” said Kate.
“Later,” Tyrone replied. “Let’s take care of this first.”
As they passed the police car, they looked through the driver’s window. A deputy, emaciated and decayed, sat upright in the seat, his hands still clutching the steering wheel. The windshield ahead of him sported a single bullet hole laced with spider-web cracks. They followed the trajectory and found a hole about the size of a dime square in the middle of the officer’s forehead. The hollow-point slug had exited the back of his skull, a hole the size of a golf ball. Dried blood and brain matter coated the headrest of the seat. Looking past him, they saw another deputy lying halfway out of the open doorway of the passenger side. A bullet wound of the same size had entered one temple and exited the other. The man still hand his hand on his holstered service revolver.
The Buzzard Zone Page 17